Myna Audio Editor Tutorials

Audio Composing with the Myna Audio Editor

Putting Poetry Reading and Music Together on a Web page

When we listen to a National Public Radio show while driving down the highway, watch a movie, enjoy a song from a wide range of sources, play a Podcast from the Net, or click on a sound player on a Web page, we listen to a mix of sound. These mixes will often include some simultaneous combination of human voice, multiple musical instruments and special effect sounds from nature or human-made sources. The layers of sounds in the mix are called tracks. The software applications for making and combining a set of tracks are called audio editors. There are many, such as GarageBand and Audacity, that run from hard drives of computers, but only one that is an online application. The Myna Audio Editor was publically announced by the company called Aviary as an available online application on September 16, 2009. There is much to learn about Myna which delivers a number of features that can provide years of quality audio composition and learning for every age level.

Myna is a good editor for a number of audio composing needs: creating podcasts, composing a song, recording musical accompaniment from actual instruments, or narrating a story or adding musical background to a story or poem. It's ten tracks are more than sufficient for most needs and it provides a small set of musical loops that can be used for non-commercial purposes.

Though not yet in the same league with GarageBand, or the commercial applications of SoundBooth or Pro Tools, the Myna development team has built a huge doorway for people and classrooms around the world to explore audio composition. Myna is not only a capable audio editor, but provides a set of musical loops that enable some music editor options as well. Myna is a baby taking its first steps, becoming part of a community of online audio composing tools. Give it time. Some of its competitors focus on music composition: JamStudio, Indaba, DubStep and MixMatchMusic.. There are also online music publishing services such as BandCamp for musical entrepreneurs. Further, there are collections of musical loops that can be imported into such applications, e.g.: Free-loops, freesound tags, and ccMixter. The site called iCompositions has thousands and thousands of examples of compositions created with a variety of audio editors. Undoubtably the community of online audio composition resources will grow, so please use the comments option at the bottom of the page to let me know when they appear.

Loops are short musical ideas played by a wide range of instruments. They are not only fun and easy to use, but easy to create. Loop creation is a great introductory assignment activity to audio editors for students. Think of loop creation as inventing a musical vocabulary words that can be used over and over in different patterns, whether as a primary musical motive or figure in the background. Think of each track as a special kind of musical sentence which through the uniqueness of music can be played in harmony with other tracks of sentences. Numerous commercial loop providing sites can also be found by searching for audio loops and music loops. The audio editor is the master maestro that calls them all together in a larger effort.

Loops (riffs or licks) can be quickly created at a computer with an online keyboard. As Myna does not have any, several online keyboards from other Web sites can be used. If the computer speakers are turned up high enough next to a microphone, playing on the keyboard can be recorded by Myna in record mode. The best of the bunch to date is Virtual Keyboard (courtesy of Birmingham, England's Birmingham Grid for Learning), resizable with 9 different instrument sounds. There are other virtual keyboards, with both online and hard drive locations. Online keyboards: CMagic's Virtual Piano; Flash Piano; Paul Flavin's Piano/Oscilloscope; New Concept's Virtual Piano. Downloadable keyboards: Keyboard Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (download and install).

Get Mayna Running

Go to Aviary's home page and ignoring the other fine online image editing applications, select the Audio Editor button and make the necessary clicks to reach the Myna Audio Editor.It is also possible to bypass their home page menu and go directly to the Myna Audio Editor.

Tutorials on How to Use the Mayna Audio Editor

This first YouTube clip is an introduction to Myna's most basic concepts and elements by the creator of Myna.

Feature Tutorial

See the YouTube videoclip below. It works through a fine Myna feature overview from what my teacher education students were guessing was a 13 or 14 year old. His comparisons with other software programs make it clear he's experienced a wide range audio editors and a screen recorder application. This is another impressive example of the "breakaway literacy" group of students from around the world that are pushing beyond school curriculum to mastering the literacy of 21st century.

Myna indicates that compositions should be limited to no more than 5 minutes total length for each audio project. The 5 minute limit is not really a significant issue, as the solution is to just create more 5 minute pieces. Currently, any single recording with Myna's Record function is limited to 60 seconds at a time. Such control can also be seen as an advantage as it forces files size to not get too large which can make it difficult or sometimes impossible to transmit them over the Net.

Myna File Management

Once audio composition work has been created and automatically stored at Aviary.com on one day, it is important to know how to get back to that creation on a different day. The clip below reviews how to find a file and edit it further, delete it and find ways to share its location at Aviary for others to hear, or to save as in mp3 or wav file format. Use the mp3 format to get the best file compression. If the screen movie clip below does not play, use this video backup link.

Examples of Audio Compositions

Annotated examples of school level projects created with such audio editors are much needed to provide an idea of the range of possibilities. ScreenToaster is an excellent tool for creating a summary videoclip of how an audio composition project was put together.

Example 1 - Poetry Study

The goal of this activity is to gain greater understanding and feeling for the rhythm of poetry. So, narrate a poem into the audio editor, add a music track, and post to a Web site page.

1. Writing and performing your own poem and music is always best. The more you write, the more you will understand the poetry composition of others. Composing and understanding need to be taught as partners which help each other, not as separate and distinct activities and courses. But composers may also have skills with one form of composition yet not another, so feel free to pick a poem written by others or add sound loops created by others. If picking from the work of others, read portions of several out loud, listening and reworking the rhythm of the poem to closely match the ryhthm of the music track.

Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki)
Open Content Alliance (http://www.archive.org/details/texts)
Million Book Project (http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks/).

As an example, I searched the Open Content Alliance site for children's poetry and found the 1897 publication of Poetry for Children by Samuel Elliot and chose The Little Doves. Part of this poem is copied below.

"High on the top of an old pine-tree Broods a mother-dove with her young ones three. Warm over them is her soft, downy breast, And they sing so sweetly in their nest.

Coo," say the little ones, " Coo," says she, All in their nest on the old pine-tree.

Soundly they sleep through the moonshiny night, Each young one covered and tucked in tight ; Morn wakes them up with the first blush of light, And they sing to each other with all their might.

Coo," say the little ones, " Coo," says she, All in their nest on the old pine-tree.

When in the nest they are all left alone, While their mother far for their dinner has flown, Quiet and gentle they all remain, Till their mother they see come home again.

Then Coo," say the little ones, " Coo," says she, All in their nest on the old pine-tree."

Listen below. There are different playback options in case one is not working.

Here's take 4, with a link to separate playback Web page and a link to the editing version so that others with accounts might explore this mix. Below is the player icon to play directly on this screen from the account space at Aviary.

part II Mayna poetry editing.egg on Aviary.

Here's take one. The audio player below is using an audio file stored in my own account space.

Creating & Sharing an Audio Composition with Mayna

The directions on how to create and share such a composition are provided in two different forms, first as a screencast showing how this works in Myna and then a set of text that repeats these instructions.

The Movies

See the screen movies of steps 2 - 6 above using the Myna Audio Editor for more details.

The Written Directions

2. Go to Aviary's site and find the Myna Audio Editor. Look for the button on the screen that says Audio Editor and then follow the links to start the application. After the application starts up and you agree to the terms of use for the music library, a set of music loops become available. Find some music loop samples that are close the beat or tempo of the poem. Insert them into one or more of the tracks (rows). Free music loops can also be imported from other Web sites.

3. Next, use a second track and a microphone to add in the poetry reading, working to roughly match the rhythm of the music. Only one minute at a time can be recorded so break up any voice recordings into one minute recording intervals. This is fine as once they are assembled together in one track, no one will notice the pause though loops can be trimmed where pauses seem too long. There is also an overall limit of 5 minutes to any single composition being edited in Myna. There are no such limits in hard drive editors such as GarageBand and Audacity.

The music track cannot be played while recording a voice-over so it is hard to tightly match the poem's rhythm to the music. If needed, there is a tempo command in the pull down menus that can be used to speed up or slow down the beat. By comparison, in GarageBand you can hear the music in your headphone set while recording your voice as well as change the beat or tempo of the song while it is playing to better find the right pace. I learned to tap my toe on the floor to get the beat down to the song, then keep that same tempo going when recording. Keep checking back in months ahead, one can expect that new features will continue to emerge.

5. A third track or more might be used to record or insert sound effects such as city traffic or the sounds of birds or thunderstorms.

6. Save. As soon as the Save or Mixdown commands are used, a request will come to Login/Register. You will not be able to Save until Registration/Login of your account is complete. Once that is taken care of, do mixdown and download the file in mp3 format to the desktop computer.

The mp3 file is now ready for insertion into many other types of composition: Web pages: slideshow editors (e.g., MS Powerpoint or Google Presentation); other audio editors; video editors; email attachments and more.

Putting an Audio File on a Web Page

The directions on how to put such a composition on a Web site are provided in two different forms, first as a screencast showing how this works in Myna and then a set of text that repeats these instructions.

The Movie

See the screen movie of step 7 about inserting audio on a page at Google Sites for more details.

The Written Directions

7. Put this audio composition on a Google Sites Web page. What will this look like? For a separate page that shows text wrapping around the audio player, see this example of an mp3 player gadget. The size of the gadgets are determined by changeable width and height numbers.

That is, move to your Google Sites web site and log in. If you don't already have one, create a new Web page as File Cabinet and use its Add button to upload the mp3 file to the File Cabinet. This File Cabinet can be used for all your file uploads or different types of File Cabinet titles can be created for different types of files depending on what kind of organization is needed.
Create a new blank page and title it Music Composition Samples or Poetry Readings or something obvious and similar.

On this newly created page, click Insert in the menu bar and search More Gadgets for something that will play the mp3 file.
More gadgets is found at the very bottom of the Insert column of commands. Though one can search for "mp3 player" or "audio player", this generates a long list of mp3 players and several of those do not work. If you search for "mp3 player varal" (the name of a creator of a mp3 player that does work) you can immediately get to a working mp3 player (though you are welcome to see if you can find others you like better). Select and add the player. Save the Web page and depending on the mp3 player that was chosen, it may begin to play some song when clicked. The next step is get the Web address of your mp3 file that is in the File Cabinet and paste it into the mp3 player so that it plays the poetry reading that you created.

On the File Cabinet page right click on the link to the mp3 file and copy the Web address of the audio file.
Move to the Web page on which the mp3 player was placed and tap the Edit button for the page. Click the mp3 player gadget to select it. Select the Properties link underneath and copy the URL of the needed mp3 file into the field or space that it provides for the Web address. This will probably mean deleting an old Web address already in that space. Finally, save the page and then click the player to hear the audio file.
For your Web site project, create the footer that needs to have a Back link to the Computers page. Put a link on the Computers page that goes to the Music Composition page or whatever title that it was given.

Now, pat yourself on the back. Audio composition is one of the fundamental elements of the digital palette. You've composed some music that included a narration track with a poem and shared it with the world in multiple ways. Not bad at all. Now look for an opportunity to integrate such instruction into a lesson you are teaching.

Parent chapter - updated to version 1.65, September 15, 2010. Page author: Houghton