Hello Tamar: The noise at the beginning and ending of recorded waveforms is annoying. It is distracting to listeners and the waves should be carefully trimmed. Edit by hand if at all possible, especially if the waves are intended for intelligibility testing and consist of nonsense syllables, words, or sentences. You’ll see that it is easy to inadvertently cut off low-intensity speech sounds such as ‘s’, ‘th’, etc. Also, make sure to cut the wave only at zero-crossings to avoid clicks. Wave editing isn’t difficult if you practice on a set of waves and listen carefully to the results. I can’t imagine that automatic editing methods can achieve this. Best wishes, Christine Rankovic, PhD From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Gabriele Bunkheila Hi Tamar, Since you mentioned MATLAB, I thought I’d share a couple of pointers. A good fit for this would be detectSpeech (https://www.mathworks.com/help/audio/ref/detectspeech.html), which uses a fairly accessible algorithm based on short-term energy and spectral spread. detectSpeech has been available in Audio Toolbox since release R2020a. In case any of your data was more challenging, you could consider trying the function classifySound (https://www.mathworks.com/help/audio/ref/classifysound.html), which has only been available since release R2020b and uses the pre-trained YAMNet network under the hood. I hope this helps – feel free to get in touch directly if you needed more guidance. -- Gabriele Bunkheila [he/him] – Product Management, DSP and Audio MathWorks From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Tamar Regev Hi all, Does anyone know of a good way to automatically trim silent parts (which may contain some minor background noise) at the beginning and end of speech recordings? Preferentially using Matlab but any other automatic way would work (we want to run this on many sound files). Thanks a lot! Tamar |