Singing in my car...
Discussion
A bit of a geeky post here, which would fit in nicely to a Science forum (hint hint, mods!).
I'm a god awful singer, but end up with my music so loud when I drive, that I can't even hear myself sing along to it. Somehow it feels "safe", drowned out so that I can't even hear how bad I am. I got thinking, though...
If someone had a recording of the inside of my car as I sing, along with a copy of the track I was singing to, how easy would it be to subtract the CD audio from the in-car audio of me singing, to essentially leave just my screeching (as well as background/ambient noise)?
I imagine it would work like those noise cancelling headphones, which play an inverted signal of the background noise on top of the background noise, effectively cancelling it out and creating silence.
I'm not worried someone would actually do this to embarass me. It was just one of those little random thought experiments I had whilst driving
I'm a god awful singer, but end up with my music so loud when I drive, that I can't even hear myself sing along to it. Somehow it feels "safe", drowned out so that I can't even hear how bad I am. I got thinking, though...
If someone had a recording of the inside of my car as I sing, along with a copy of the track I was singing to, how easy would it be to subtract the CD audio from the in-car audio of me singing, to essentially leave just my screeching (as well as background/ambient noise)?
I imagine it would work like those noise cancelling headphones, which play an inverted signal of the background noise on top of the background noise, effectively cancelling it out and creating silence.
I'm not worried someone would actually do this to embarass me. It was just one of those little random thought experiments I had whilst driving
k off
erdnase said:
A bit of a geeky post here, which would fit in nicely to a Science forum (hint hint, mods!).
I'm a god awful singer, but end up with my music so loud when I drive, that I can't even hear myself sing along to it. Somehow it feels "safe", drowned out so that I can't even hear how bad I am. I got thinking, though...
If someone had a recording of the inside of my car as I sing, along with a copy of the track I was singing to, how easy would it be to subtract the CD audio from the in-car audio of me singing, to essentially leave just my screeching (as well as background/ambient noise)?
I imagine it would work like those noise cancelling headphones, which play an inverted signal of the background noise on top of the background noise, effectively cancelling it out and creating silence.
I'm not worried someone would actually do this to embarass me. It was just one of those little random thought experiments I had whilst driving
Very easy to do.....next question I'm a god awful singer, but end up with my music so loud when I drive, that I can't even hear myself sing along to it. Somehow it feels "safe", drowned out so that I can't even hear how bad I am. I got thinking, though...
If someone had a recording of the inside of my car as I sing, along with a copy of the track I was singing to, how easy would it be to subtract the CD audio from the in-car audio of me singing, to essentially leave just my screeching (as well as background/ambient noise)?
I imagine it would work like those noise cancelling headphones, which play an inverted signal of the background noise on top of the background noise, effectively cancelling it out and creating silence.
I'm not worried someone would actually do this to embarass me. It was just one of those little random thought experiments I had whilst driving
E36GUY said:
Papa Hotel said:
I... erm... I don't understand the question.
I probably didn't explain it too well.Basically, if you're listening to a mix of 2 sound sources.. A and B, which could be a radio and a television in the same room. If some clever audio wizardry dude had a sample of sound A, could he extract that from a mix of A+B, effectively isolating sound B?
Like.. I sing along to a song and am drowned out by the volume of the song. Could an audio technician "subtract" the song from (The Song + Me Singing) to just leave a god awful embarassing track of me singing?
Apparently it's easy.
As an aside, I read somewhere that in some rough American "hoods", they have microphones on poles spread throught the city. If/when there is a gunshot somewhere in the vicinity, by processing the delays on the microphones that pick it up, they can pretty effectively triangulate where the gunshot came from.
Also.. I saw a video where they had microphones spaced all around a huge stadium. A guy with a plan view of the stadium on a touchscreen, pressed the screen corresponding to some point in the stadium, and all the microphones synchronised to account for the sound delay from that particular spot, in effect isolating the sound from that area from all the background noise.
Pretty cool stuff imho!
edit: Linky to the stadium mic. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/super-micro...
Edited by erdnase on Thursday 19th May 20:25
No doubt it could be done, not necessarily easily though. If you take a regular music track, and then an instrumental copy of that track, inverse the audio waves of the instrumental (in effect turning the audio wave upside down) and play the the vocal track and the inversed instrumental together at exactly the same time, the instrumental will effectively cancel out the instrumental on the regular vocal track, leaving you with the accapella. Obviously this works better on some tracks than others, but it's quite suprising how effective it is sometimes.
Fraser Z4 said:
If you take a regular track, and then an instrumental copy of that track, inverse the audio waves of the instrumental (in effect turning the audio wave upside down) and play the the vocal track and the inversed instrumental together at exactly the same time, the instrumental will effectively cancel out the instrumental on the regular vocal track, leaving you with the accapella.
Exactly what I meant, thanks! crofty1984 said:
E36GUY said:
E36GUY said:
OP - it is similar to the way noise cancelling headphones work. They only tend to work on background droning noises, because the real-time processing means that there's enough of a delay that one-off, sharp sounds can't be anticipated and corrected in time (at least that used to be the case when a mate of mine worked on them). In this case, in theory, if you've got the tune to hand (i.e. you've got the pattern of sound you want to blank out, so no "realtime processing" required), and the recording in the car is good enough quality then yes it should be possible.
In reality, it won't work so well if the recording varies in volume from the original, and you'd still have to deal with the in-car road noise, so you might have to do a couple of passes and try to fluff out the road noise with a copy of you driving without the music in exactly the same traffic conditions
Yes this is rather silly isn't it
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