My experiences with time-compression / expansion, especially with voice, have been ‘unsatisfactory’. When I recently compressed 1 minute of speech down to 52 seconds, I used a manual method of going through the audio file reducing the duration of silences. I started with pauses between sentences — longest, then phrases, then between words. Most of the semantic information remained in tact, but the speaker sounded a bit breathless. My next step, considerably longer, was to work on closing up syllables, and shortening plosives and many unvoiced consonants. A long process, but important aspects of vowels, and especially vowel groups were left mostly in place. The next step was to shorten vowels and vowel clusters by removing ‘duplicate’ wave forms. In listening to the original and shortened versions back-to-back, I felt a loss of ‘intimacy’ in the meaning. It was more like being spoken at, than being spoken to. For me, PSOLA processing turned the speech into a computer voice very quickly. This is one of the problems I have with pitch-correction software used throughout the pop recording industry. And Tom Lehrer with The Elements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM Kevin On 2016, Jun 23, at 2:43 AM, Versfeld, Niek <n.versfeld@xxxxxxx> wrote: |