Making good audio distortion/effects

Audio distortion can be done in endless ways: White noise, chirps tones with Gverb, Equalizing blowing into the mic, taking the footage audio and using foldover distortion... Yadda Yadda. Anyway, there is one form of distortion I could never figure out to make. The whistling and voice muffling from Entry 30.
I suppose the effect for the muffling could just be the camera, but for one with an epic microphone... Things are difficult.

SadDevil wrote:

Audio distortion can be done in endless ways: White noise, chirps tones with Gverb, Equalizing blowing into the mic, taking the footage audio and using foldover distortion... Yadda Yadda. Anyway, there is one form of distortion I could never figure out to make. The whistling and voice muffling from Entry 30.
I suppose the effect for the muffling could just be the camera, but for one with an epic microphone... Things are difficult.

Whenabouts on that clip do you mean?

Most wave editors will have a tone generator which will allow you to produce pure tones in the higher range (e.g. 12,000Hz upwards). If you then boost that signal really high, add it to the mix of your original camera audio and then compress it heavily, you can get it to obliterate the higher range and underwaterify the real sound.

Muffling much more is easily done with EQ though - again, most wave editors will have it - or subtle low pass filters. If you have a specific effect you want to do, bust me a PM. I majored in this shit, I might as well use it.

Lol thanks man. I guess I just gotta use audacity's generator to the fullest. also, the EQ is my best friend. :3

I love playing around with Audacity. Except when I accidentally create That One Frequency that fucks my head up.

Lol I only use audacity more or less. It's very versatile, especially after adding in plugins.

I really like Audacity myself and I use it for all of my audio editing. I know quite a bit about it actually...

You could also try some free audio of static and meld that in with your film audio by mixing it in Audacity. Of course that means you'd have to get the audio alone and it's a pain, or you could put the sound effects in your timeline in whatever video editor you use.

You could make audio sound distorted and muffled like it's lost quality if you play it on your computer and record it through the speakers, or headphones. You could try eliminating sound channels, too.

I also know that if you remove too much of the track with Audacity's pop/click and noise removal tools, you can end up with very tinny audio. However the sensitivity on it needs to be rather high and same with spike peak height.

You could try degradation by multiple encodings and savings. Sort of like with VHS tapes that get copied too many times, you could try saving and encoding copy after copy of the film footage. Maybe upload a short segment to Youtube, re-download, rinse, repeat. Of course you'd need to find a video converting website that lets Youtube through to do this, because Youtube doesn't like it when people download and convert stuff from their site since people use it to pirate films and music.

Audacity can also generate white noise, but you probably know about that already. Anyway, just thought I'd offer some creative solutions...

Quote :

You could also try some free audio of static and meld that in with your film audio by mixing it in Audacity. Of course that means you'd have to get the audio alone and it's a pain, or you could put the sound effects in your timeline in whatever video editor you use.

Something you mention a few times, so I thought I should point it out: if your computer has a line-in port (which they all seem to nowadays), you can just run a cable from your line-out port (headphones/speakers) to your line-in port (microphone, etc.) and record audio from anything that way.

If you want to degrade audio the way you described earlier, the simplest way to do it would be to import it into iTunes/whatever as an mp3 set at a low sample rate. That's what makes the audio sound all squelchy. It's a similar process of importing and reimporting it into whatever media player you use, and there'll probably be somewhere where you can alter the default import bitrate or whatever. Might be a bit quicker that way is all.

Hell, most modern computers (read: every computer produced at least in the past decade) have the capacity to record what is playing on the speakers through the "Stereo Mix" in Windows. (I don't know what the Mac function is, and neither should anyone else.) And that's if you don't want to go through any one of, oh, half a dozen ways of doing that. The only reason you'd need a cable and a separate line in or line out is if you're trying to splice in audio to a live stream.

Agreed Cougar. You could even set the volume quite low so that by recording through the speakers, it'd sound tinny.

As for white noise, have you ever tried opening a non-sound file in Audacity? It's possible if you mess around a bit, and you can get some weird-sounding crap out of even a simple word document with the words "Hi, my name is (your name here)" in it.

Cougar Draven wrote:

Hell, most modern computers (read: every computer produced at least in the past decade) have the capacity to record what is playing on the speakers through the "Stereo Mix" in Windows. (I don't know what the Mac function is, and neither should anyone else.) And that's if you don't want to go through any one of, oh, half a dozen ways of doing that. The only reason you'd need a cable and a separate line in or line out is if you're trying to splice in audio to a live stream.

Meh, sometimes I just do it for convenience, as weird as that may sound. If you just want ten seconds of a YouTube video's audio then it's much easier.

As for the whole Stereo Mix thing, I have no idea, I use a Mac like a tool and this method is just more intuitive for me.

Well, do whatever works for you. No need to make too much stress for a simple sample of white noise, or even for trying to make the audio sound all messed up. Unless, of course, you want to put a ton of work into it.

DarkShadows wrote:

Agreed Cougar. You could even set the volume quite low so that by recording through the speakers, it'd sound tinny.

As for white noise, have you ever tried opening a non-sound file in Audacity? It's possible if you mess around a bit, and you can get some weird-sounding crap out of even a simple word document with the words "Hi, my name is (your name here)" in it.

I have done that. Almost never on purpose. (It is a bitch and a half to extract Minecraft audio files, let me tell you.)

Fotzepolitic wrote:

Cougar Draven wrote:

Hell, most modern computers (read: every computer produced at least in the past decade) have the capacity to record what is playing on the speakers through the "Stereo Mix" in Windows. (I don't know what the Mac function is, and neither should anyone else.) And that's if you don't want to go through any one of, oh, half a dozen ways of doing that. The only reason you'd need a cable and a separate line in or line out is if you're trying to splice in audio to a live stream.

Meh, sometimes I just do it for convenience, as weird as that may sound. If you just want ten seconds of a YouTube video's audio then it's much easier.

As for the whole Stereo Mix thing, I have no idea, I use a Mac like a tool and this method is just more intuitive for me.

No, I get it, it makes sense, not having to switch functions or anything. If you've got a handy male-male 1/8" mono/stereo jack, it's easier, for sure.

Found a nifty way to make feedback like white noise in Audacity today while goofing around with some old recordings of mine, and I thought I'd stick it in here since it seemed relevant. If you use the Echo filter and set the decay factor to 1 or higher, you get this nasty, harsh sounding hum/buzz noise that sounds almost like electrical feedback from an old monitor or something. You don't get a lot of it, but you can loop it.

SoundBible.com has some pretty cool sound effects.
Findsounds.com is another good resource as well.
Other than that, I use Sony Vegas Pro 9 to distort sound.

Cougar Draven wrote:

No, I get it, it makes sense, not having to switch functions or anything. If you've got a handy male-male 1/8" mono/stereo jack, it's easier, for sure.

I pretty much live in a spider's nest of cables, so that's fine.

I used to have the same tangled web, but my ex-wife always made me hide the cables away in the closet.

I'm going to try out that Echo thing in Audacity. Sounds nifty.

One caveat, Cougar: You'll badly need to equalize or fix clipping in the audio if you try that. Go too high with the decay attack time and it won't save properly. Apparently there are not only things man wasn't meant to know, but also files that man was never meant to possess... :c

I think I have at least six of those files on my hard drive right now.

But yeah, I'm not intending to use this seriously right now, it's just a play around.

Somewhere there must exist a Necronomicon of files that should not be. A "Necrodatacon", if you will.

Yeah, and really, let's face it. If anyone were to possess such a thing?

It'd be me.

I ended up doing a clip-fix several times on the feedback I made and came up with this nasty, distorted, wavering feedback. It's awesome-sounding and in a few days when I can post links, I'll try to upload them to Mediafire or Tindeck or something and get links to them here for the use of every Slenderblogger and vlogger.

Better living through white noise. ^w^

I'm not a guru by any means, but I got some really neat sounds by opening various types of files (jpg, txt, pdf) as raw sound in my sound editor. Lots of staticy, glitchy goodness.

Also you can get the muffled effect with a low pass filter and a tiny bit of reverb, iirc.