If you want clearer audio, the best thing you can do is to get a better microphone like this
one here. To improve it further, you get closer to the microphone. Listen to how clear that sounds!
Get too close and you start hearing all the kliks and stuff and it doesn’t sound so good.
Although some people like that stuff apparently! But what if
you record something, and you can’t re-record it, and it sounds like CRAP?
The standard thing to do- and what I do with all my voice recordings on
this channel- is to use noise cancellation. At the end of every recording, I do this.
BUM.
I do this to give myself 3 seconds of ‘silence’, and I end with ‘bum’
because B is an abrupt-looking sound, and so I then know I can use those 3 seconds
of footage before I bum myself as reference to show the computer …the sound of silence.
But this silence isn’t silent. For if it was, then there would be no need for noise
cancellation! If I get these 3 seconds of silence and amplify them, then there will
eventually be background ambience of some sort. Sometimes humming, but mostly just a faint hiss:
‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS’
brought on through limitations in the equipment that I use.
What noise cancellation does, once fed those few seconds of ‘silence’ is to then go EHHERHEHH
over the REST of the voice clip to reduce the background noise in those segments as well,
by the amount that it heard in the silent section. This will HOPEFULLY
reduce or even eliminate everything but the sound of my beautiful voice.
Honestly, if my voice recording is good, then it’s not too important that I do this- the
background sounds will be mostly drowned out by whatever sounds or music I choose to put
my voice with in my videos. The worst that will happen by not using noise cancelling
is that you’ll get smart-arses in the comments section who clearly have their volume turned
up wayyy too high, pointing out all the background noises going on my your video.
On second thoughts it’s horrible when that happens,
and that’s why noise reduction is so important!
BUT! Do too much noise cancellation, and it starts eating away at the sounds that you
WANT to hear as well, reducing it all down to a digitised, distorted sounding squiggle. And you
DON’T want that. Perhaps because I do so much voice work, I’ve leaned more towards removing
less of the noise, rather than to remove too much just cos I can’t stand how that sounds.
And it’s perhaps because of this that I’ve been underwhelmed by voice enhancement technologies.
There are already technologies like RTX Voice, which are EXTREMELY powerful at removing
background traffic and typing and other sounds like that, but I find often nibble away at the
words being spoken as well. Whenever I try that sort of thing with anything but a decent setup,
I feel it makes me sound too much like a robot, and so I disable it again.
Thing is- it’s hard to judge these things in practice because you tend to only hear the
result of OTHER PEOPLE using these things, and never how well it does at fixing your own setup.
For all I know, Voice RTX and Discord’s built-in KRISP audio enhancements have saved me the pain
of hearing thousands of key presses from other people. I know that many people rely on things
like KRISP to moderate which noises are heard from their mics are passed through to the server.
I don’t do that; I’m from the push to talk generation. I’m forever talking to myself,
to the toilet seat, to fluffykins- anything that will listen. And most
of the stuff I say is inane tripe. Sort of like these videos but WORSE. There’s no way
I’d be at the mercy of noise cancellation to decide which of my vocal utterings everybody
else in the chatroom should hear. No: I use push to talk. Yet for some reason I
still press that talk button whenever I laugh or scream. Why do I do that.
The latest audio enhancement thing for me to discover is Adobe’s,
which claims to be able to transform your poorly recorded audio into something that
sounds a lot more professional-sounding. And it seems rather powerful! I mean,
not necessarily GOOD, but definitely powerful, using AI to reconstruct how it thinks the audio
SHOULD sound. Let’s see how it fares! So that audio of me talking at the end
of my last video wasn’t the greatest. Here’s a snippet just to remind you.
‘Back in my day, graphics were something to be celebrated!’
Here it is, using standard noise reduction methods.
‘Back in my day, graphics were something to be celebrated!’
And here it is, run through Adobe’s thingy.
‘Back in my day, graphics were something to be celebrated! When Crysis came out,
people who could run it, ran it and enjoyed it. Those who couldn’t,
looked forward to it uh ah um argh getting the next computer upgrade that would allow them to.
A complete overhaul. It’s interesting that it hasn’t just removed the echoes,
but has kind of changed how my voice sounds as well. I’m not sure I prefer
how it sounds- it still sounds like but it’s a little too wavery and has subtly
changed the sounds of some of the words. For instance, whereas I originally say RUBBISH:
‘How rubbish it was’
it has changed it to say RUMMISH.
‘How rummish it was’
‘How rubbish it was’ ‘How rummish it was’
Granted, I didn’t pronounce the B’s too clearly before. But while I didn’t
pronounce the right letters too clearly, it’s now very clearly pronouncing the WRONG sounds.
But overall, a very interesting result, and significantly DIFFERENT-sounding from normal noise
cancellation methods. This Adobe AI voice thingy probably with MANY great, real-world applications!
I could, for instance, use it to clean up the audio on the old VHS tapes I’ve been digitising.
‘WHAT IS YOUR NAME’ ‘I’m PHILIP’
In fact, that’s all I can think of using it for right now. But I still won’t be doing that,
for the same reasons that I’m not AI-upscaling those tapes- and that’s because I know this kind
of technology is still in its infancy, and will only get better as time goes on. So it would
be such a shame to AI-‘enhance’ these things now when had I preserved the original instead,
then it would have allowed me to do a better job at a later date once technology had got even
better. But out of curiosity, let’s see what we can do with AI enhancements here in 2022!
‘OOMOGMMOGOMOM WEH WWHWHWHEH. What is your name?’
‘I’m Philip’
So yeah, maybe this stuff isn’t such a great idea
right now. But I’ve just come up with an even better use for it!
‘Hello dehumidifier! What’s your name?’
Seems the dehumidifier’s a bit shy right now.
I went to a spirit-thingy for Halloween, where we visited a haunted pub and looked
for signs of paranormal activity. Problem was: all these spirits could only communicate through
a specific app on a phone. And that app wasn’t free! But now I have Adobe’s thingy,
I decided to attempt something similar by running that video clip through the
program to see what it would say. So I proudly present to you: Séance, with a Dehumidifier.
‘Hello dehumidifier, what’s your name?’
‘KEWOME DKMK FSK JFOOSF JSF O’ ‘BWOQWO OWO OWHWOOW’
(Lydia : ‘Blahbeh’)
So yes, all fun and games, I thought, until it created a voice out of nowhere:
‘Meow’
‘Ooh the baby shopping’
Proved once and for all that my cat’s possessed.
To be honest, my results with normal voices
were rather dull- even when spoken over the sounds of a dehumidifier.
‘What is your name?’
‘My name is RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE’
‘What is your name?’
‘My name is RABEL RABBA RAP RABBLE-oos’
Given how unclear the input was, I think the output was perfectly understandable.
To make the Adobe thingy truly fail required
me putting on a silly voice in the first place, like so:
‘Smash that subscribe button,
leave a like, and share with all your friends, family and loved ones and all those inbetween!’
Now this is when it DID alter the sounds,
to the point where the words spoken no longer made any sense at all.
‘Smash that subskull button, leave a like and share within your friends, family and love plain
du chor un wenna dushennuk ennuk’
‘Thank you, dehumidifier.’
But when I speak like that in the first place to make it mess up,
is it any wonder when the outcome also sounds stupid?
Do you know what Brown Noise is? No, no that kind. THIS kind!
‘FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF’
I ran that through the program because I wanted to see it polish a turd.
‘du, dudu, dudoud, upolup’
Put it simply: random noise may utter the occasional human-sounding gurgle,
but for the most-part, Adobe’s thingy simply quietens it. It is, after all, designed to
eradicate background noises which sound very similar to this. What Adobe’s thingy appears
to do is to find variances in the pitch and volume, and to amplify those bits, whilst trying
to convert them into human sounding …sounds. For instance, here’s an instrumental song of mine:
(Music)
And here it is, through Adobe:
(Music with robotic sounding vocals)
And since that was such a fun example, here’s another.
(Music) (Music with robotic sounding vocals)
Interesting how these generated voices remind me of OTHER robotic
sounding voices that I’ve heard in the past, like Glados from Portal,
(Music with robotic sounding vocals)
That voice that’s used in some of the Daft Punk songs and there’s even
a spot of Jean Michelle Jarre in there somewhere.
(Music with robotic sounding vocals)
I swear the voice even attempted a beatbox right there.
It’s just a shame the music’s still playing in the background. But,
if we add some brown noise to the mix, like so:
(Fuzzy sounding music)
…then running it through Adobe’s thingy leaves us with pretty much the voice, and nothing else
(Robotic voices)
Thanks, Adobe. And THAT’S how you create demonic sounding voices. So in conclusion:
this tech is completely wasted on me.
But remember: if you use it, then use it only for good! Or for dank memes.
In fact, I don’t care how you use it. Have fun.