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.
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No Subject Given
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Limits
I conclude that this idea is progress, but ONLY up to a point, beyond which it is pure manipulation.
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close captioning
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I have been using this at home already...
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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
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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.
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Re: FX Uses This Method
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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.
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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?
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