Reducing interference/distortion over broad spectrum

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hi,
I’ve looked through several posts here and have seen many good solutions and learned a lot. However I still need to post here because I could not help myself any further in an unfortunate situation:

I need to transcribe this recording (see spectrogram view) which has some horrible interference on a broad frequency spectrum most of the time. So if I listen closely it’s barely to impossible to recognize what’s said - for the full length of this recording it’s ugly to impossible work for me/my ears.

  1. So I isolated unaffected frequency bands but can’t understand enough (too small unaffected bands). Is it possible to isolate multiple unaffected frequency bands?

  2. I also tried noise reduction by identifying a noise profile (where noise only). This reduces the ugly interference significantly but I just could not find parameters and/or noise profiles such that enough of the spoken words remain. Maybe I’m simply too noobish. Do you have any advice?

    interference
    interference1370×724 325 KB

2

Give AI a go (while it’s free)

3

Great idea, thanks! :slight_smile:

After playing a bit with this AI tool I could not achieve desired results…especially the parts that remained impossible to understand vanished completely.

Btw. for a closer look on lower frequencies:

interference_2
interference_21362×723 320 KB

So if any ideas for enhancing this or the noise profile recognition come up, please let me know!

4

Extracting understandable speech from incomprehensible noise only happens in the movies. The human brain is currently better than AI at comprehending speech: if you cannot understand it there’s little hope of success.

5

Thank you anyway! :slight_smile:

After playing excessively with the filter curve EQ followed by snipping together several noise only parts for better noise profile identification I got most of it fairly understandable. Quite some time investment is required but if needed Audacity has amazing capabilities! :smiley: