Fledgling voice artist seeking counsel

My dear Koz,

You spelt it wrong. :stuck_out_tongue:

Now write it out 100 times.

Aye, perhaps you’re right. I’ve been getting tension in my shoulders from obsessing on it (I do most of my work standing). I am thinking of trying one last thing, however and that is a humidifier since I already have one. I just need to wait for the cleaning agent to come since I’ve not used it in a year.

Hmm, interesting thread. I’ve added a comment to it. Why are you ducking? :stuck_out_tongue:

And WHEN are you going to stop by? Seriously, you’d be welcome to use my room but also you’d probably spot things I could improve or we could just chill with a film. I can treat you to my home theatre room as a thanks for all your help. :slight_smile:

Cheers.

Why are you ducking?

Part of that discussion was the idea that the “defects” should not be removed. They’re part of the natural voice and many people speak like that. Further, anything you do to the presentation has to be done every time. Post production editing as a fuzzy rule takes longer than the actual show — sometimes may times longer — and adding production tools and processes that may or may not be valuable is not welcome.

This won’t hit you until weeks into your career when your fame and fortune pile up, but your time allotted doesn’t.

Any problems or complaints of sound quality means you have to go back and revisit the whole show and make sure everything is as you intended. How many times can you stand to sit through an hour show to make sure your mouth clicks and pops didn’t have a bad reaction with the noise removal process?


“I got a call from HarperCollins. They want you for the voice of Charlie the Cat. They reserved time at Paramount Studios on Melrose in Looping Studio 7 (the one by the Commissary — try their French Dip). That’s not a problem, is it?”

Koz

You spelt it wrong.

I did look it up multiple times, but interpreted the result wrong.

I paint with verbs but don’t always get the colours right.

Koz

Understood.

And whilst ducking behind that couch you still ducked my question. PM if necessary.

Cheers.

Who the heck rhymes “four” with “Arkansas?” Nobody who is from there. It’s a pity the British can’t speak English.

Catching up in this long conversation. Don’t know if has been mentioned yet, but you should use this instead of silencing noises in the pauses:

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/punch-copy-paste/28906/1

Use edit, preferences, keyboard to assign a key to the pasting effect so that it is as easy as ctrl-L, and then, do not use ctrl-L.

It is undesirable to have any intervals of absolute silence. Rather, it is desirable to have some room tone and have it consistent. Drops from room tone to silence might be noticeable and seem unnatural.

This is well-trod earth. The last few passes had background noises in the -60 range (as required), and gentle, graceful noise reduction that produced little or no damage to the voice.

We’re hashing out the last decimal point of filters and effects needed to squeeze out the best possible quality with the minimum tools and the least damage.

Koz

It’s a pity the British can’t speak English.

Some of them have trouble with American, yes.
Koz

i remember. Mouth clicks. How’s that coming along?
Have you submitted anything final to ACX testing?

Koz

Has it also been pointed out that it is easy to measure RMS of a selection by using Analyze, Contrast. Or I think a few lines of magic words in the Nyquist prompt could do it too.

The Contrast dialog can be funky though, if multiple projects have been opened and closed. It may stop opening until you restart Audacity.

I have produced eight titles through ACX and QA rejected files only for (1) incorrect spacing at start and end of chapter or (2) exporting stereo instead of mono. Easily remedied.

How many other ACX producers are active here? I only know Ian and one other, but myself, I have been inactive lately.

Odd,

I didn’t get the usual e-mail update that there were changes to the thread.

Paul, thank you for the suggestion, I shall have a look (though Koz doesn’t seem keen). I too had realized already that I didn’t like absolute silence so I had taken to copying pieces of quiet ambient noise but, as you pointed out, they aren’t the same size.

Also, good to make your acquaintance on FB tonight and to meet a fellow voice artist. :slight_smile:

Koz, not yet. Tomorrow the cleaner for my humidifier arrives and I know I’m being picky but I’d like to try recording whilst that is on to see if I can remove mouth clicks even further. I did speak to ACX and they’ve told how and where to put a sample for them.

As for the bait, I shall not rise to it as I am British. :stuck_out_tongue:

Cheers.

Be careful if the track has multiple audio clips because the Contrast tool may then give an incorrect reading. The bug has been fixed in 2.0.6 alpha (http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720) and the fixed version will be available in the next Audacity release.

I think this is the right magic to calculate rms of the selection using the Nyquist prompt (the last sample of the sound is left out by integrate, but that is negligible), but I get a discrepancy of a fraction of a dB from Contrast.

I hope the bug is with me and not in Contrast.

(let ((time (- (get-duration 1) (/ (snd-srate s)))))
  (linear-to-db (sqrt (/ (snd-sref (integrate (prod s s)) time) time))))

Assuming that the track is mono and the selection is not too long, you can get the RMS value with one line:

(linear-to-db (snd-fetch (rms s (/ (get-duration 1)))))

The maximum length that this works with is just over 2 million samples.

I was avoiding the 2 million sample limit. My answers seem to be slightly more than from Contrast, and differences seem larger with time, but still tenths of dB or less out to 30 minutes.

I too use Blue Snowball with adequate results. I am not expert enough to know what I am missing in a costlier mic. I just stand it on a card table. I use the cardioid setting with the back of it pointed toward the sometimes noisy street. I record without headphones so I know when airplanes approach, or vehices, and I wait out the interruption. I made a simple enclosure of hanging blankets with a roof and put the laptop outside. It sits on a cooling stand that draws power from the USB port, and those fans run quieter than the computer’s own, and they run constantly, not intermittently, so that what they contribute to background is consistent. I use wireless mouse and keyboard and a monitor. I find an input volume of .4 right. My mic distance is a bit close and I use a pop filter.

All to show that I learned to mitigate noise at the source first, but low cost expedients can work.

I am not expert enough to know what I am missing in a costlier mic.

Maybe not much. I’ve used the one from work and it’s a respectable performer. I use my Expensive Microphone® because it has multiple patterns and other controls and sounds very slightly crisper. But if someone said I had to shoot something with a Snowball, I would not be horrified. I would start looking for a graceful environment and bring my furniture pads with me.

Close is good. I think a lot of volume and noise issues could be solved by somebody presenting who isn’t terrified of the microphone. On the other hand, it could be said that one reason for a pop filter’s existence is to keep the presenter from swallowing the microphone. There is a sweet spot.

I think people are lulled into a false sense of competence by cellphones and conferencing aided significantly by not being able to hear themselves at the other end.

Koz

As for voice distortion effects… I have used them, but I say, only if you are trying to be comical, or doing sci fi or fantasy. Even so it is a bit of spice that you do not want to overuse tiresomely. Maybe a bit of telephone like eq in serious stuff, but that is it. Distinguish males and females just enough to contrast – a slightly higher pitch, a bit of breathiness. You don’t have to be a perfect female to come across as a good dramatizer of all parts in a fiction. Listen to some audiobook greats like George Guidall.

Now this is artistic opinion, in which I am even less schooled than technical matters, so take or leave it as you like. But ultimately it is about pleasing ordinary people who listen, so I will speak as one of those.

INTEGRATE loses a bit of accuracy as (apparently) it is calculated with single precision.
An alternative approach, less elegant than your solution but also less heavy on ram:

(let* ((s (if (> len 2000000)
              (let ((step (round (/ len 1000000))))
                (snd-avg (mult s s) step step op-average))
              (mult s s)))
       (slen (snd-length s ny:all))
       (s (snd-avg s slen slen op-average)))
  (linear-to-db (sqrt (snd-fetch s))))

True, damage to the signal that looks like one big spike, is not quite like natural but undesirable click noises that do oscillate and decay on a fine scale, and the best math for finding and fixing each is perhaps not the same.

But I must disagree. There is a signature for mouth clicks, even if they are riding on another sound with bigger amplitude. They are obvious to the eye as well as ear, if you look at your sound in spectrogram. Clicks appear as bright vertical streaks. I figured out some math to automate the identification and filtering out of “bright vertical streaks” with some success. I intend very soon to post an updated version of my click removal tool, and as a bonus, a de-esser that almost fell out as an adaptation of much of the same code.

Ian, I recommend you get familiar with spectrogram as well as waveform views. They complement each other. Spectrogram helps you find where a click is more readily while zoomed out, but waveform helps you zoom in more precisely. I also prefer waveform dB view to waveform, because it stretches out the low levels and compresses the high levels, making little noises more obvious to the eye.

To use two views at once, try this: duplicate the track, mute the bottom one, make the top waveform dB and the bottom spectrogram. Click the pocketwatch (“Synch lock”) so that deletion from one causes corresponding deletion in the other. Treat the top track as your master, the bottom as just an aid that you throw away later. Learn what various speech sounds look like in each view.

I’m remembering we got someone else past mouth noises a while back. It wasn’t pretty. I think an elf designed custom software for his voice.

I first heard that term “Nyquist elf” from Koz, I think. Gee, it seems I have become one.