How to emphasise a word in a voice recording

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

I have a recording of a voice and one sentence is “I hope you enjoy it as much as we do”.

They emphasised the word DO instead of the word WE.

I said the line to myself, and worked out the word We needs to be a bit louder but also a tad higher in register or pitch.

Which is the best way to do this please?

Or is it even possible?

Thank you

2

You can use the [u]Envelope Tool[/u] to fade-up and/or fade-down the volume. And the trick is “fading”, leaving the endpoints unchanged so the volume doesn’t make a sudden jump up or down.

also a tad higher in register or pitch.

You can try the Change Pitch (or Change Speed*) effect but it might sound unnatural.

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  • The Change Speed effect changes speed & pitch together (like when you change the speed of an analog record or tape.) It’s “simpler” than changing pitch & speed separately and you are less likely to get artifacts/side effects so it’s often better for small changes (if you can live with changing both together)…
3

The best way is to re-record with the correct emphasis.

Inflections in speech are very subtle - there’s a lot more going on that simply loudness and pitch, and it is virtually impossible to manipulate those subtleties with audio editing software (though there are now some AI programs running on supercomputers with huge databases that can do quite a convincing job).

4

Thank you both for your replies.

Yes, sadly I can’t re-record it as the audio is already an AI text to speech software, (although much more convincing than Google and Alexa. It’s called Synthesys).

I tried various ways to punctuate it but I still couldn’t get the software to make the right word emphasised.

I guess I will have to word it differently.

Thanks

5

Or get a human to read it.

6

Thanks Doug, I tried this and used Change Speed only 2% after I zoomed in and made the “We” longer (with copy and paste), and the “Do” shorter.

It does have a bit of distortion crackle, but to the untrained ear it sounds like mic anomalies.
It was the copying and pasting a section of the word to make it longer that caused the crackle, not the Change Speed effect.

I’m happy with it.
Thanks

7

Yes of course that’s the best option. I was just wanted to know if it was possible with Audacity.

I cross-posted and managed to do it (albeit a less than perfect result), as mentioned above.

Thanks