We're In Such A Hurry That We're Even Rushing Through Recordings
from the speed-that-up,-won't-ya? dept
It's been nearly two years since a TV station got into all sorts of trouble for using some compression technology to speed up a football game so that they could add an extra 30 second commercial. The technology works by cutting out tiny, unnoticeable segments during the game. Over the course of a three-hour football game, it's pretty easy to get an extra 30 seconds without anyone noticing at all. Since then, plenty of TV stations have adopted the technology. However, the NY Times is looking at a different application for the technology: speeding up audio recordings. While using the technology for video compression, the overall effect is small, because you're trying to make it completely unnoticeable. However, with an audio recording, humans can still understand the audio at much higher speeds. The speed of our normal conversation is limited by how fast we can really talk - not how fast we can hear. In the past, speeding up audio meant increasing the pitch and getting the infamous "Chipmunks" effect. However, this new technology lets people speed up audio recordings many times over without such an effect - and it's still quite understandable. They also say that it doesn't suffer from the sort of "blurring" you get when people try to speak quickly themselves. Suddenly, people are listening to hourlong radio broadcasts in much shorter time frames - giving people back one of their most precious resources: time. In fact, some people claim that once they get used to listening to audio at high speeds, it's tough to go back to listening to people speak at normal speeds (someone compares it to the difference between dial-up and broadband). Some fear that constant use of such systems will make us all start talking much faster, like we're in some sort of Aaron Sorkin TV show, but others doubt that will ever happen. In the meantime, how long will it be until TiVo or someone like that starts advertising this technology as an additional "feature"? Forget just skipping commercials, you can now cut a few more minutes off the shows your watching and end up watching even more TV shows.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Limits
I conclude that this idea is progress, but ONLY up to a point, beyond which it is pure manipulation.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
close captioning
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I have been using this at home already...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
FX Uses This Method
It may seem inconsequential, but sometimes they'll cut what seems to be a fragment of dialogue that actually moves the story line along. Annoying.
MLO
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: FX Uses This Method
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The technology used to be called VOX
A audio clipping circuit and a variable speed motor, for up to 2x speed up.
Sold in the early 1980's.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
20 year old technology
First, run an autocorrelation function on the source stream to detect intervals of uniform pitch. Most pitch intervals contain many nearly identical small units of pitch or pitch periods.
Then delete as many redundant pitch periods from within the pitch intervals as needed to change the stream to the new speed. It sounds better if you blend the edges of the spliced periods. The result is pitch-normalized, i.e. doesn't sound like the speaker was breathing helium.
It only takes a few hundred lines of C code.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: 20 year old technology
My question is, can a computer be programmed to replay an audio source at a variety of speeds, say .7X normal to 2X normal in predetermined increments of .1X normal? Would it work on any new source or would each one have to be individually programmed?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]