Making audio sound bad on purpose
- Bushido Philosopher
- Joined: Mon Jun 25, 2001 7:19 pm
- Location: California
Making audio sound bad on purpose
Here's something a bit different. How can I make an audio clip sound bad intentionally? More specifically I want to riddle it with static and make the vocals almost unrecodnisable. Though I do not really have any sounds of static so I can't simply just blend it.
Any methods?
Any methods?
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- the Black Monarch
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- koronoru
- Joined: Mon Oct 21, 2002 10:03 am
- Location: Waterloo, Ontario
It all depends on how you want it to sound.
For static: I can't believe you really don't have *any* audio of static at all, but if you really don't, then make some! Stick a microphone into your sound card and record your computer's fan. Use a software synthesizer to generate white noise. If you're using Linux, do to grab a megabyte of random numbers, and then use your favourite sound converter to translate that from "raw PCM" to whatever format you want. If you have a record player attached to your computer, get a dusty scratchy record and record the gaps between songs. If you have a radio tuner in your computer, record the static between stations; or plug a microphone into your computer and record an actual radio. Plug in a cassette player and record tape hiss. Each of these techniques will give you a slightly different flavour of static which you can mix into your music.
To simulate the sound of music played through a telephone connection, or on a small portable device like a Walkman: use a filter, either high-pass or low-pass depending on the effect you want. Telephone lines can reproduce roughly 100Hz to 3000Hz, so you configure your filter to cut out everything else. Just doing a sharp low-pass at about 3000 is probably good enough. Small speakers or earphones tend to do pretty well with high frequencies but not low ones, so you'd use a somewhat more gentle high-pass somewhere in the bass range. Experiment with different kinds of filters and different cutoff frequencies and rolloff rates.
I wouldn't recommend using low-bitrate compression as a "static" effect unless you're specifically trying to make it sound like low-bitrate compression, because it tends to be pretty distinctive - not pure static, but more sort of whistles and electronic-type sounds depending on the algorithm. That could possibly be a fun effect, though; it might, for instance, be nice for a high-tech communications link that's undergoing heavy interferance. ("Your signal's breaking up, captain!" *zonk* *whistle* *blorp*)
Another fun and vaguely related effect, although it would be a little more involved, is called "vocoder"; the idea being to take one track and apply its spectrum to distort another track. You should be able to find software to do this for most platforms; I don't know if the popular editing programs will do it as a plugin or not. Some rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s used it to good effect. (My favourite example: Tommy James and the Shondels, "Crimson and Clover")
For static: I can't believe you really don't have *any* audio of static at all, but if you really don't, then make some! Stick a microphone into your sound card and record your computer's fan. Use a software synthesizer to generate white noise. If you're using Linux, do
Code: Select all
dd if=/dev/urandom of=noise.raw bs=1024 count=1024
To simulate the sound of music played through a telephone connection, or on a small portable device like a Walkman: use a filter, either high-pass or low-pass depending on the effect you want. Telephone lines can reproduce roughly 100Hz to 3000Hz, so you configure your filter to cut out everything else. Just doing a sharp low-pass at about 3000 is probably good enough. Small speakers or earphones tend to do pretty well with high frequencies but not low ones, so you'd use a somewhat more gentle high-pass somewhere in the bass range. Experiment with different kinds of filters and different cutoff frequencies and rolloff rates.
I wouldn't recommend using low-bitrate compression as a "static" effect unless you're specifically trying to make it sound like low-bitrate compression, because it tends to be pretty distinctive - not pure static, but more sort of whistles and electronic-type sounds depending on the algorithm. That could possibly be a fun effect, though; it might, for instance, be nice for a high-tech communications link that's undergoing heavy interferance. ("Your signal's breaking up, captain!" *zonk* *whistle* *blorp*)
Another fun and vaguely related effect, although it would be a little more involved, is called "vocoder"; the idea being to take one track and apply its spectrum to distort another track. You should be able to find software to do this for most platforms; I don't know if the popular editing programs will do it as a plugin or not. Some rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s used it to good effect. (My favourite example: Tommy James and the Shondels, "Crimson and Clover")
- ongakuka
- Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2003 8:07 am
If you have compression/limiting plugins in your audio app, check those out. White noise, brain/biorythm (Cool Edit). Avoid flangers, reverbs, and phasers. A lot of what you want to do is layer sounds or effects on top of each other (starting with a 'clean' music source) and if you have a multitrack editor (Cool Edit Pro.. Premiere even - just doesn't have many plugins), it's a lot easier to experiment to find what you are looking for.
- ongakuka
- Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2003 8:07 am