Reduce lateral lisp via technical means?

[billholt]

Hi,

I have a series of recordings by a person who speaks with a little lateral lisp, or 'slushy ess'. When listening with earphones, it's tolerable. But when listening through say, an average laptop speaker, it sounds more severe.

The lisp is not that heavy, I mean 's' and 'sh' are still distinctly different.

I'm wondering if there's any way to enhance the 's' of the entire audio through EQ, or other functions of Audacity. What kind of curve do I draw to enhance this specific sound?

Thanks in advance.

[billholt]

I can't seem to edit this post. I'd like to post a sample of such recording, and here it is. The pronunciation of 'ess' is a lot clearer in my earphone than in laptop built-in speakers.

[Trebor]

There is an effect called re-essing (the opposite of de-essing) , but the bad news is it will boost every ess it encounters, even those which don’t need it like “several”.
IMO the only solution is to manually boost each individual deficient ess , which is going to be time-consuming …

sample, before-after.mp3

before-after ess of "yes" boosted

(208.13 KiB) Downloaded 138 times

Audacity spectrogram of attached before-after mp3

before-afer, boosted ess of 'yes'.gif (278 KiB) Viewed 2094 times

[billholt]

Thanks, but where do I find this re-esser effect? I can't find it in both Mac OS X and Windows version of Audacity. Are you referring to a third party plugin?

[Trebor]

Thanks, but where do I find this re-esser effect? I can't find it in both Mac OS X and Windows version of Audacity. Are you referring to a third party plugin?

Sorry, third party plugins e.g. ... http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 44#p195044 [ de-essers can also be used to re-ess ]

As I mentioned above I don't think a re-esser is going to cure an intermittent lisp as it will boost all sibilance indiscriminately.

What I was suggesting in my previous post was to individually boost each lisping ess using treble-boost equalization so its spectrogram looked more like the clear "s" of the word "several".