Voice quality - speed and pitch

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I am “Proof-Listening” for LibriVox; I download and play a track, listening not for text errors, but overall quality such as too much/little space between sentences or paragraphs, background noise and chair squeaks. Accent and pronunciation is not judged at all.
I am PLing an audio track recorded by a rather slow speaker.
I figure that if I increase the Speed to 1.174, I can save myself 15% of the time to PL each track.
I figure too that if I decrease the Pitch by 17%, the voice (“timbre”?) returns to what I consider the speaker’s normal voice, using my 75-year old ears!
The only real criteria is “If you were drifting off to sleep at night, or riding your bike, or flying Toronto to Paris, would the story, as read aloud, entertain you?”
I use the audio track in read-only mode; it is not my job to edit the track.

If I have understood Speed and Pitch correctly, the following macro applied to a track should save me some time without invalidating my analysis.

Comment:_="Speedup"
ChangeSpeed:Percentage="17.438825"
ChangePitch:Percentage="-17" SBSMS="0"

Of course I could not resist this:-

Comment:_="SlowDown"
ChangePitch:Percentage="17" SBSMS="0"
ChangeSpeed:Percentage="-17.439"

I have push/popped the speed/pitch commands, which prompts me to ask:-
For my purposes (checking at voice quality for the general flow of the audio in terms of gaps and the like), should it make any critical difference whether I speed/pitch or choose to pitch/speed.

Again, I am not storing the results of these changes; using them only to reduce the elapsed time it takes me to “OK” (or not) each of up to 110 tracks of 30 minutes each.
Thanks
Chris

2

Have you tried Change Tempo?

3

Now don’t go all technical on me (scolding and wagging a finger!)

No, I have not. I saw it there, but having tried speed&pitch for a Proof-Listening, that seemed good enough. At PL, the task is to spot aberrations that are outside the accent or text level, but at the pop/click/hiss noises and gaps. Repeated text is a target, too, but that is not really about the quality of the audio of spoken text.

I will experiment with Tempo and report back.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Chris