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Re: Audio editing



Abin and List,

Forgive double-postings, as I apparently made an error trying to attach a file. It may be easier for you to do this in a scriptable (and free) environment like Praat instead of Audition. I would like to share a simple tool that I have made for this kind of intensity normalization.

In the Praat script linked here, you can scale the intensities of all sounds in a folder to a selected level. It will alert you if any of the sounds clip, and offer you the option of decreasing your target intensity level until none of them clip. In the end, you will have a folder full of normalized sounds and an info text file to let you know what changes were applied. The original sounds are preserved.

This is designed to use for a folder full of short sounds (e.g. words), and might not be ideal for longer sounds. It does not perform compression. 

 Find the script here:

http://www.mattwinn.com/Scale_intensity_of_all_sounds_check_maxima_v2.txt

To use it in Praat, either copy the text into a new Praat Script window or open it directly.

 

Regarding naturalness - you should be aware that compression and (to a lesser extent) normalization actually decrease the naturalness of the signals by altering each of them in different ways. There are some inherent volume differences between some speech sounds (e.g. /s/ is louder than /f/, /a/ is louder than /u/), so normalizing levels for these sounds would decrease naturalness to some extent. 

 

Good luck,

Matt



On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 9:04 AM, Matt Winn <mwinn83@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Abin,

It may be easier to do this in a scriptable environment like Praat instead of Audition. I have attached a script that you can use in Praat to scale the intensities of all sounds in a folder to a selected level. If the sounds clip, it will alert you and offer you the option of decreasing your target intensity level. This way, you can prevent any clipping in the output files. In the end, you will have a folder full of normalized sounds and an info text file to let you know what changes were applied. None of the original sounds are altered.

This is designed to use for a folder full of short sounds (i.e. words), and might not be ideal for longer sounds. It does not perform compression. 

 

Regarding naturalness - you should be aware that compression and (to a lesser extent) normalization actually decrease the naturalness of the signals by altering each of them in different ways. There are some inherent volume differences between some speech sounds (e.g. /s/ is louder than /f/, /a/ is louder than /u/), so normalizing levels for these sounds would decrease naturalness to some extent. 



Good luck,

Matt


On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:05 PM, Abin Kuruvilla Mathew <amat527@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear All,

I have a set of audio files (consonants and vowels) to be editied in Adobe audition and was wondering to what extent and how much of Normalization (RMS) and dynamic compression (if necessary) would be needed so that the naturalness is preserved and clipping doesn't occur.

kind regards,
Abin

--
Abin K. Mathew
Doctoral student
Department of Psychology (Speech Science)
Tamaki Campus, 261 Morrin Road, Glen Innes
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland- 1142
New Zealand