Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here
Today I have been working on the final part of The Young’uns In The Mix, which I shall release on The Young’uns Podcast and David Eagle’s Pick And Mix in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to one of Youtube’s recommended videos last night, I came across a tutorial that gave tips for removing unwanted noise from recordings. This video surfaced at an opportune time because it may come in useful for the bit of The Young’uns In The Mix that I am currently working on. I am taking samples from a variety of old radio recordings and records, and there is quite a lot of crackle and hiss on the various samples. But I’ve been able to strip a lot of that extranious noise away, thanks to this tutorial video. Basically, you play the programme a sample of the noise you want to remove, it then analyses it and removes that specific noise from the recording.
However, even more beneficial and exciting than removing unwanted noise from old recordings, is the notion that theoretically I can now use this tool on The Young’uns Podcast to automatically remove Michael Hughes and his various inane comments. This will save me a hell of a lot of editing time.
It will also come in useful when I release Now That’s What I Call David Eagle, Volume One, which is the much anticipated compilation album of songs made by me between the age of seven and ten. I will now be able to use this noise removal tool to delete all the tape hiss in order to create remastered versions of the songs. This is very exciting, as imagine how incredible it will be to hear Daniel Wet Himself Today in Crystal clear sound. There was also a video that autoplayed on Youtube, as I began to fall asleep, about a tool that creates stereo or surround sound tracks from mono files, using some kind of clever audio trickery. So I will be able to release a special enhanced version of Now That’s What I Call David Eagle, Volume One, meaning that you can listen to Daniel Wet Himself Today in 7.1 surround sound. This will be especially useful for when some big budget film company wants to turn my life into a blockbuster movie; they will be able to incorporate my childhood recordings into the film in immersive 3D audio.
Also, when I was a child I recorded everything, meaning that I have so many cassette tapes of me talking. This means that I probably won’t need to have a voice actor playing the part of my seven-year-old self, because I could cobble together my dialogue using samples of my actual seven-year-old voice.
I suppose this is also a benefit of recording so many Dollops and Podcasts. If I ended up having a trgic accident or had a condition that meant I was unable to speak and had to communicate using a device like Stephen Hawking, I could probably still speak with my old voice rather than using the Stephen Hawking style voice. I’ve recorded so many hours of me talking, that I most likely have a recording of me saying nearly every word in the dictionary, or at least every word that I’d be likely to want to say. I could then put all these words into the machine and thus, despite not being able to use my mouth, I could still speak with my own voice. Granted, it would take a rather long time to go through every single word I’d ever spoken and add them to the computer, but I’m paralysed for goodness sake, so I’d have plenty of time on my hands. Plus, nowadays, I could probably get people to help me over the Internet. All they would need to do is download the speech programme, sift through all the Dollops and Podcasts and add the words to the speech programme’s database. I’m sure I’d have plenty of Dollop listeners who’d be happy to help out with such a project.
Once all the possible words have been added to the database, we can then role out Eaglebot faze 2. If there happens to be a word that I want to use that I don’t seem to have ever recorded me saying, then my team of helpers can start taking syllable from other words and editing them together to form the missing word. So for instance, let’s say that there is no recording of me saying the word “infrastructure,” but there is a recording of the word “infrared” and the word “structure,” we can take the “infra” from “infrared” and place it before the word “structure,” to create the word “infrastructure.” Obviously, there will now be lots of instances of me saying the word “infrastructure,” because I’ll have said the word quite a few times when I come to record the audio version of this Dollop, unless of course something terrible happens to me overnight before I get a chance to make the recording, but I am confident that regardless, I will still have enough words recorded to make the word “infrastructure,” so I’m not overly concerned.
I suppose there is also commercial viability in this project, as people will be able to download my voice onto their computers, tablets, phones
and satnavs, and have my voice reading their text messages and emails, and giving them directions. Maybe I’ll setup a kickstarter campaign to get this off the ground. Get in touch if you’re a programmer who fancies helping out.
