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Technology wins mugs David Dorn discovers that a few folks, with nothing better to do, use their PC technology to win radio quizzes! We’d all do it, given the chance – own up at the back! Local radio stations, especially from Aunty Beeb, have this habit of running “Mystery Voice” challenges – you know the kind of thing. They either play you an unfeasibly short snippet of someone’s voice and ask you to identify it, or they alter the voice in some way and ask the same thing. They’ll speed it up, or slow it down, or apply some other kind of technique to disguise it. But – and here’s the thing – they use PCs to do it. In fact, the application the Beeb uses is called RadioMan Quick Edit Pro, which is very similar to Cool Edit in the way it works. Of course, what that means is that if the Beeb can change the voice, anyone with a suitable PC and some sound editing software can “reverse engineer” their changes to get the real voice back. Crafty Now, that’s a bit crafty, really. It’s not cheating exactly, but it’s probably not quite what the Beeb expects. It is, though, what some people are doing. I’d heard about this particular pastime from a friend of a friend, who had a mate that knew somebody who had a friend that was doing it (yeah, right!). I decided to put it to the test, and see whether it was likely to be successful. Now, at this point, I’ve got to come clean. I work on one or two of a local radio station’s shows at odd times, and one of my current projects is producing music competition questions. Readers who reside in the Radio Newcastle broadcast area might like to tune into the station between 12 and 1pm on a Saturday, and have a listen to Geordie’s Woblbly Ice Cream Van. The competition is entitled “The Chimes, They Are A-changing” and the idea is that a well-known hit tune has been converted to ice-cream van chimes. No problem there, but this is a particularly rickety and wobbly ice-cream van, so the tune is all but unrecognisable (at least, it is by the time I’ve finished with it). I create the sounds on PC (no, I’m not going to tell you how!) and we edit a few sound effects into the tune at the BBC studios, using Radioman, although I could easily do it at my offive – it’s just that the sound effects library is at the Beeb, and not here. Anyway, back to the plot. I know the folks that produce the Mystery Voice competitions, so I tuned in and recorded the voice, knowing roughly what they’d done to it (it’s actually pretty obvious).
It’s not that hard – in fact, if you’re using something relatively powerful as a sound editor, you can change the speed of the clip in real time, and it’s fairly easy to sort out when the voice sounds “right”. So far so good, but the problem is that, even though the voice is obviously “right” I have no idea who it is! I recognise the voice. I know I’ve heard it before, but I just cannot place it! So much for cheating – and it’s a testament to the setters of this particular question that they’ve chosen a person whose voice is relatively familiar, but is probably a “D” list celebrity. Technology I’ve got to say, though, that the fun part, as I’ve discovered, is not so much the chance of winning a prize as much as the challenge of working out what the setters have done to disguise the voice and reverse their process. Now, you might think that’s a bit nerdy and geeky. Well, maybe it is, but if you’ve any interest at all in using your PC with sound and music, it’s a challenge. If anyone who listens to Radio Newcastle can sort out what I’ve done for the Chimes compo, by the way, drop me an email – I’ll let you know if you’ve got the process right! Have your say - click here |
Once
I’d recorded it into Cool Edit Pro, I speeded it up again (it had
been slowed down by a third) to get the true voice back.