I am going to open up one more example file for this chapter. Side Effects Good. Once again located in your media resources folder. Dave was always upset with Alvin of Chipmunks fame. After all who wouldn't be a little uppity after listening to that whiny little voice for years and years. Thankfully, Soundbooth allows us to work with pitch and time in a much less aggravating way than previously available.
So we can keep our uppityness for situations in which it's really called for. Remember our definition of frequency, it's the pitch part of the sound. A higher frequency is a kin to a higher note and the converse is also true. Sometimes it will be really nice to be able to freely change the pitch of a given recorded signal. So we just crack the pitch up, right. But wait, frequency is locked to time. It's the number of vibrations per second after all.
If we want to speed up a clip to make it play faster, all of those vibrations are getting crunched into less and less time. So it also makes the pitch go higher. The same number of vibrations in less time equals higher Hertz. It's part of the natural order of things that when pitch changes so must time and when time changes so must pitch. It's like space and time, bread and butter, Mork and Mindy or golf and frustration.
Once the two are put together in a recording, it's not easily possible to pull them apart again. That's how the Chipmunks were done. All the spoken and sung parts were recorded at half speed than spread up to double normal rate at playback. The result timbre in pitch and octave higher than normal while doubling the half speed stuff worked out to normal timing.
But that kind of process involves a long of overhead. Music reference tracks have to created at half speed to give the voice artists something to hear while recording. A very talented voice artist need to be employed who are able to handle the half speed recording process and still a lot of nuance in performance character is lost when recording a subject at a very unusual tempo.
So what if we wanted to achieve the Chipmunks effect without going through all that hassle. So again, couldn't we just record at normal speed and normal pitch and then crank the pitch up without having the speed as well? For many years the answer to that question was simply no, but in more recent times the power of the computer is beginning to allow this to happen.
I have here a recording of one of our voice over artist warning consumers about the possible side effects of Zoombasol. Let's take a listen.
[Demo]
Just for fun let's Chipmunkify it. Go ahead and move over to the Tasks panel and select Change Pitch and Timing. Go ahead and click the Pitch and Timing button. Once again we have a small array of settings. The Time Stretch slider is how we increase or decrease the duration of the clip. Since we want to change the pitch of the voice and maintain the clip's current length, we are going to keep it set at 100% which is no change. The Pitch Shift slider sets how much we want to crank the pitch up or down. The numbers here refer directly to semitones or half steps.
12 half steps is equals to one octave. So the range that you are given is either three octaves up or three octaves down. Let's crank the pitch up one octave exactly. It's a little bit tough to get the slider set directly to 12 here. So I am just going to click right on the number and type it in. We want to check our Solo Instrument or Voice option, because that's exactly what we have here, one person talking.
I am also going to uncheck Preserve Speech Characteristics, because our whole point here is actually to change the timbre of the voice. Let's preview to hear what it might sound like.
[Demo]
That certainly sounds like Alvin to me. Let's go ahead and apply the effect. You can see how it changes in the spectral view. It appears to stretch all the over tones away from each other. Let's take a listen to the final processed audio, not just the preview.
[Demo]
If total realism is what you're after, then these effects need to be used very sparingly and adjustments kept to an absolute minimum. You will quickly realize that even moderate changes made with these particular tools tend to strongly change the overall sound of your audio. Alright, that was fun. But let's apply this Soundbooth feature in a really useful way. Go ahead and undo back to the original clip. So we have a clean slate with which to begin.
Let's hear the unedited clip one more time to get it back into our heads.
[Demo]
As fast as our announcer has spoken here, he still wasn't able to get through the full list of potential deadly side effects in the eight seconds available to him. Commercial timing is at a huge premium, given that the whole spot needs to be less than 30 seconds long. There is no way we can extend the side effects portion, so that 10.5 second is quick enough.
So we are going to employ Soundbooth's Pitch and Timing tools to get him through right on time. This kind of effect is very commonly used in modern and commercial recordings. Once again go ahead and choose the Pitch and Timing button. In the dialog box this time we are going to simply set the total duration desired. I need to get him in within eight seconds.
You will notice Soundbooth does the timing percentage calculation for us. We should reset the Pitch Shift to 0 as our goal is here is to not change the timbre of the voice, simply the timing. Again it's important to have Solo Instrument or Voice checked as this optimizes the process for that specific situation. Also, this time we want to preserve the timbre of the voice to the greatest extent possible. So we are going to check Preserve Speech Characteristics.
When you've got the settings as you wish them to be, go ahead and preview the audio then Apply.
[Demo]
Let's go ahead and apply this change. We will just click and deselect. You will notice here that nothing really happened to the audio in either the spectral view or the wave form. However, you will notice here that your timing bar reflects that the entire clip is now eight seconds long. Let's listen one last time. I will put the playhead to the beginning and go ahead and play through the clip.
[Demo]
These tools can be used anytime you need to separate frequency and pitch from duration and time. Used carefully and lightly, they can help to clean up the timing of your audio, and used in more extreme ways, they provide some very interesting and sometimes unexpected results.
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