Making audio sound bad on purpose

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Bushido Philosopher
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Making audio sound bad on purpose

Post by Bushido Philosopher » Fri May 23, 2003 7:00 pm

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?
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burntoast
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Post by burntoast » Fri May 23, 2003 7:41 pm

Compress it at a very low bitrate. :wink:
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the Black Monarch
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Post by the Black Monarch » Tue May 27, 2003 1:24 pm

Reanimation.

'nuff said.
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AbsoluteDestiny
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Post by AbsoluteDestiny » Tue May 27, 2003 3:20 pm

You can increase the gain until you get lots of clipping, that would be nasty :)

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Tom the Fish
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Post by Tom the Fish » Tue May 27, 2003 3:27 pm

buy a cheap microphone and speakers. really cheap, really crappy. re-record the song with these tools.

Tom

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koronoru
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Post by koronoru » Tue May 27, 2003 3:39 pm

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

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dd if=/dev/urandom of=noise.raw bs=1024 count=1024
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")

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Tab.
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Post by Tab. » Tue May 27, 2003 5:06 pm

you know whats really fun, encoding pure static as a 16 kbps mp3
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ongakuka
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Post by ongakuka » Wed Jun 25, 2003 12:57 pm

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.

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Tab.
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Post by Tab. » Wed Jun 25, 2003 10:26 pm

DUDE!
how many people have said now
> 2 week old posts = NO
maybe even 1 week
:?
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ongakuka
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Post by ongakuka » Wed Jun 25, 2003 11:22 pm

dude, give it a rest already.. if there's no definitive "I ACCOMPLISHED MY QUEST" post, it's fair game and I consider it open for discussion.

seriously, why does my posting pertinent information to legit questions in this forum really hurt you guys so severely? time to grow a set..

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