For my Sonic Analysis of a Song I chose to do the first two minutes of Don’t Stop Believing by Journey. I decided to use this song because of its strong instrumentals. It uses five instruments: Violin, Piano, Lead Guitar, Drums, and Rhythm Guitar. I started the assignment by creating the timeline on illustrator and having everything snapped to the grid so that all my lines would be even and accurate, then the listening began. I listened to the song a different time for each instrument so that I could focus on it and Isolate where it began and ended. I’d mark where the instrument began, continue listening, then when I noticed it had stopped, I paused the song in Adobe Audition and marked my line in Illustrator. To set up my timeline, I started with the first recognizable instruments to place the lowest. The Violin and Piano come in first, then Lead Guitar, then Drums, and finally, Rhythm Guitar. At first, I found this project very overwhelming. I was trying to break the song into seconds, listening to all the instruments at once. But once I broke it down and focused on an instrument at a time, I managed to figure it out and accurately plot the music onto the timeline.
