Removing words from speech, and maintaining the tone

[steve]

How about reversing the sound?

[Trebor]

It's amazing. Even with some weapons-grade damage to the monolog, you can still make out some of the words.Koz

True of sine-speech, once you've heard it a few times ...
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/mat ... ve-speech/

[MinHooi]

Hi Steve - Reversing the sound? How?

Trebor - the sine-wave speech link is very helpful. I can only hope that my participants are naive to everything. Unlikely The change in waveform which subsequently change the frequency is not good too. It will remove the emotional tone, while trying to remove the words.

[Trebor]

Reversing the sound? How?

"Reverse" (i.e. backwards) is in Effect menu ...

angry original then reversed (backwards).mp3

(343.67 KiB) Downloaded 166 times

[steve]

You could also select one word at a time and use the Reverse effect, which will produce something like this:

AngryMan-backward.ogg

(130.36 KiB) Downloaded 78 times

[steve]

You could also try this plug-in: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 42&t=61488

[MinHooi]

Hi, I tried reversing the speech. I gave it to a person to try, and he laughed out loud. Didn't even notice that there was anger tone. So, not good.
Thanks to Koz, Trebor and Steve for trying to help me. I will just have to figure something out.

[steve]

If it was about image, not sound, I'd suggest applying 'smudgung' effect to it. I guess there must be something similar to do with sound.

That's a good idea.

A similar technique with audio would be to add a lot of "delay" or "reverb". I think the problem with this approach will be that when the effect is strong enough to disguise what is being said, the sound will not be recognisable as speech (it'll sound like an engine in a metal pipe) though the long term spectrum will be almost the same.

I think the interesting thing that has come out of looking at this question is the huge amount of damage that can be done to speech before it becomes incomprehensible.

I have some audio clips taken from a movie, and had it edited to 10-seconds. I want my participants to judge the emotional tone of that clip, and not rely on the semantics to judge.

How about obtaining some samples from a foreign language film?

[Trebor]

I think the interesting thing that has come out of looking at this question is the huge amount of damage that can be done to speech before it becomes incomprehensible.

LPC10 relies on that : it's the bare bones of speech ...

JFK before-after LPC10.mp3

(202.65 KiB) Downloaded 205 times

[LPC10 via SoX, very speak-n-spell]