Removing silence from a sound file

Gary Lee Nelson's icon

I am using recordings of speech as an input to a pitch tracker. I want to
remove the pauses between words and sentences. Is there something in MSP
that can do this?

Cheers
Gary Lee Nelson
Oberlin College
www.timara.oberlin.edu/GaryLeeNelson

Wilber's icon

If you're playing recorded speech into the pitch tracker, can you not just remove the pauses in audacity before using them in your patch. or are you recording live then replaying intot the pitch tracker?

Will

seejayjames's icon

With some cleverness using index~ perhaps? You could set a duration range cutoff of zero signal levels and remove them where they occur. Would take a bit of fiddling but I imagine it's doable.

Also, waveform~ (but you probably knew that)

-CJ

Gary Lee Nelson's icon

I have prerecorded speech samples that I am loading into a buffer~.
Sometimes I want the rhythm of the speech but when I time stretch, the
pauses are too long. What would work for me is to batch process all of my
files to remove the pauses. Then I would choose the pause-less samples when
time stretching is beyond a specified time threshold.

I am using play~ to change playback speed then gizmo~ to transpose back to
the original pitch level.

On 3/17/07 3:59 PM, "WillChadwick"
wrote:

>
> If you're playing recorded speech into the pitch tracker, can you not just
> remove the pauses in audacity before using them in your patch. or are you
> recording live then replaying intot the pitch tracker?
>
> Will

Cheers
Gary Lee Nelson
Oberlin College
www.timara.oberlin.edu/GaryLeeNelson

Roman Thilenius's icon

in protools thats a one-click job! :)

i was also already thinking of creatin a tool for this with max.

Wilber's icon

i guess if you have a batch of sound samples its gonna take too long to individually edit them in some audio process software.
if you play the sound files into the [record~] object with append mode turned on. then use a noise gate on the sound output of the soundfile your recording to trigger the [record~] on and off.
then set up loads of em and mass process them that way!? this would edit out the silences in mass batches.

Will

Gary Lee Nelson's icon

What I want to do is delete the silence and run the remaining sounds
together without pause.

This...phrase...becomes......this
Thisphrasebecomesthis

On 3/17/07 3:59 PM, "WillChadwick"
wrote:

>
> If you're playing recorded speech into the pitch tracker, can you not just
> remove the pauses in audacity before using them in your patch. or are you
> recording live then replaying intot the pitch tracker?
>
> Will

Cheers
Gary Lee Nelson
Oberlin College
www.timara.oberlin.edu/GaryLeeNelson

Jean-Francois Charles's icon
Gary Lee Nelson's icon

We have a winner! Thanks Will. Your reminder about the append message to
record~ was just what I need. I was able to tune Tap.gate~ (thanks to Tim
Place) to smoothly remove the silences. Now I can write a batch processor.

On 3/17/07 10:48 PM, "WillChadwick"
wrote:

>
> i guess if you have a batch of sound samples its gonna take too long to
> individually edit them in some audio process software.
> if you play the sound files into the [record~] object with append mode turned
> on. then use a noise gate on the sound output of the soundfile your recording
> to trigger the [record~] on and off.
> then set up loads of em and mass process them that way!? this would edit out
> the silences in mass batches.
>
> Will

Cheers
Gary Lee Nelson
Oberlin College
www.timara.oberlin.edu/GaryLeeNelson