Randomized Splicing

Hello everyone, I am working on a linguistics study in which I am taking speech samples, chopping them, and randomly splicing them back together in order to make the speech unintelligible. I got this great chopper code from this topic thread https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/automated-silence-interval/32511/9 and I thought I would put it out and ask is any one knows a way to randomize chunks of audio. I have thought about splitting the audio track around the chopped chunks and then manually moving them around, but perhaps there is an easier way. Thanks for any insight :slight_smile:

Was the “reverso” effect not suitable? https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/need-help-with-effects-for-psych-study/36079/2

Does this have anything to do with recording inter-dimensional beings?

We ended up going with the chopper code you suggested- which was super helpful! Now I’m trying to figure out a way to assemble the chopped bits back in random order :slight_smile:

I found this old (experimental) plugin and have updated it and enabled it for longer audio chunks than the original design. Give this a go (try the default settings first):
wavelet.ny (3.16 KB)
It is called “Wavelet…” (which is a reference to early experiments by Iannis Xenakis rather than to modern Wavelet theory).
Note that this plugin is only intended for experimental purposes - there is no error checking in the code, so if you do something stupid with it, it will do something stupid :wink:
If you use it in your research and your research culminates in a published paper, please include a credit (and I’d be interested to read the final paper, if that could be arranged).

Thank you so much, steve! I will absolutely credit you, you have been a lot of help :slight_smile:

Hello, this is a question directed to steve.

First of all, thank you so much for the plug-in!
I am considering the possibility of using your wavelet plugin for an experimental design. Can you please explain the details of how this plug-in modifies audio? Applying this effect requires me to specify the “wavelet duration,” “stretch factor,” “randomization factor,” and “random distribution.” Can you explain what each of these property values means?

Also, it would be really helpful if you can direct me to where you found the old plug-in. Thank you!

Sorry, but I wrote that plug-in 7 years ago and have no recollection of where the original version was - probably somewhere on my old computer.

As to what it does, you should be able to get a pretty good idea just from playing with it and trying out different settings. For a more precise and detailed understanding you would need to study the code - it has quite a few comments in the code to aid understanding. As Nyquist plug-ins are plain text files, you can open the plug-in in any plain text editor (such as NotePad++) to view the code.

OK! Thank you so much!

This is directed to sethtreace.

Hello, I’m also looking for a code that does random splicing and I just wanted to ask if you ended up using this plug-in. If that’s the case, can you direct me to the study? A link to the journal would be great! Thank you!