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Re: Cleaning up recordings with background noise

Subject: Re: Cleaning up recordings with background noise
From: "vickipowys" vpowys
Date: Sat Apr 10, 2010 3:51 am ((PDT))
Hi Desiree,

What about posting an example or two of the sounds you wish to make
sonograms from (complete with highway traffic), and some of us can
have a little play around with our own pet systems, and see who comes
up with the cleanest sonogram?  Examples could be posted on the
naturerecordists web pages?

In Raven you can easily remove whole chunks of unwanted sound to make
a clean white background, and just so long as you don't touch the
actual birdsong notes it is acceptable scientifically for a
sonogram.  The sound would then lack some frequencies and might sound
a bit strange, but you will know that the song itself is untouched.
Make sure you keep a sample of the original sound though.  This
method is in effect the same as using 'whiteout' when you make
sonograms the old fashioned way.

Alternatively you could use EQ (such as apEQ) to take out the lowest
frequencies e.g. traffic noise, and that might be enough to then give
you clean sonograms.

Vicki


On 10/04/2010, at 11:46 AM, Desiree L. Narango wrote:

> Hi group,
>
> I have recordings that I would like to clean up some of the
> background noise (mainly loud highway traffic) so I can have better
> looking sonograms.
>
> Any advice on the best way to do this? I have a suite of software I
> could use, Raven lite, audacity, wavepad. I've played around with
> noise removal profiling but it seems to just warp the recording as
> whole, bird song included.
>
> What's worked for you? Any advice from acoustic researchers,
> professionals or hobbyists is appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Desiree
>
>






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