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For my parody song, I chose to write lyrics about “doomscrolling” and use the song Zombie, by the Cranberries, as the music. Many teens (and adults) today can relate to the feeling of scrolling on our phones for hours on end, often leaving us feeling mentally drained and blank. I frequently see people of all ages staring at their phones while walking down the hallway, waiting in line, and even during family dinners in restaurants. But, I’ve realized that spending most of our time on screens is taking away our ability to experience moments authentically with full presence and attention. Because of this, I was inspired to write a call to action to address how much we overuse our screens similar to the political expression used in Zombie, which was written as a protest against the violence and conflict in Northern Ireland during the 90s. I’m quite happy with how my lyrics and voice sounded during the recording and I enjoyed improving my editing and not being afraid to sing terribly!
First, I downloaded the karaoke version of my song so I could save it before editing. Next, I had to write my lyrics. I found it very helpful to listen to the original song simultaneously while writing, which made it easier to select words that matched the syllables of the original lines. After I finished drafting my lyrics, I created an Adobe Audition session to prepare for the recording process. For recording, I got to use the IsoBooth for the first time which was super exciting! I learned how to manipulate input volume, use the microphone, and save my recording with Audition. I was pretty happy with my first take so I just left it at that. Then, I edited my voice by normalizing the volume, using the de-esser tool, adding reverb and delay to change the sound depth, and I also changed the pitch of my voice to be very high and low in some parts. Finally, I made some manual fade adjustments to the music in the background. I feel that I should have focused more on increasing my input level when recording to make it less quiet, but overall I’m happy I learned a new skill of audio editing!