{"id":3420,"date":"2006-08-02T13:19:52","date_gmt":"2006-08-02T13:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/08\/get-rid-of-those-cicadas\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:44:25","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:44:25","slug":"get-rid-of-those-cicadas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/08\/get-rid-of-those-cicadas\/","title":{"rendered":"Get rid of those cicadas!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Linda and Frank for a very interesting workshop<\/a> last Friday. I picked up some great tricks on using transcriber<\/a> and audacity<\/a>. Perhaps the best trick I learnt was how to remove cicada noise from my PNG recordings.
\nMaybe you already knew how to do this (or maybe you just fiddle with the EQ), but I always thought this was in the realm of Hollywood fantasy (like when the forensics guy magically “enhances” a grainy image to reveal the killer’s face in a thriller). Removing the noise allows me to more easily transcribe a busy recording, and seeing as insect noise was pretty constant and loud through all my recordings, this is quite handy. There are some caveats, but here’s how to do this using freely available, cross platform software.<\/p>\n


\nStep 1<\/strong>
\nLoad your wav file in audacity and go to a quiet region. Select a portion of the background noise that you want to eliminate. Be sure that the selection is only made up of noise that you want to remove. Don’t select a section that has any voices in it, this won’t work. Likewise, animal noises within the speech range can’t be removed.
\nStep 2<\/strong>
\nGo to the “Effect” menu and select “Noise Removal…” and then click on “Get Noise Profile”.
\nStep 3<\/strong>
\nSelect the entire sound (or the bit you want to remove noise from) and go again to “Noise Removal…”
\nStep 4<\/strong>
\nMake sure the slider bar is down near the “none” end of the scale. Too much noise removal will hinder your efforts by introducing artefacts (a.k.a. strange blippy noises). Click “OK”.
\nStep 5<\/strong>
\nPreview your changes, and try again if there’s too many artefacts. Select a cleaner quiet region, or lower the settings in the Noise Removal plug-in.
\nStep 6<\/strong>
\nOnce your happy with it, export the file (always leave your original alone! This is just a temporary file to help you transcribe). Go to the “File” menu and select “Export As WAV”.
BONUS HANDY HINT!!!:<\/i> Don’t use MP3 files with transcriber, there’s a bug in the program that messes up the time codes.<\/p>\n

While you’re in Audacity, other useful things you can do include normalising the file and you can filter out the non-speech frequencies (below ~50Hz and above 8000Hz) using an EQ. This will (usually) boost the levels so you can hear better, and filter out any distracting noise.
\nWhile you may think all this is over the top, and I guess for a good recording it is, filtering out distracting noises can make it surprisingly easier to transcribe, and especially to pick up on the subtleties you missed the first time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Linda and Frank for a very interesting workshop last Friday. I picked up some great tricks on using transcriber and audacity. Perhaps the best trick I learnt was how to remove cicada noise from my PNG recordings. Maybe you already knew how to do this (or maybe you just fiddle with the EQ), … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-fieldwork","category-paradisec","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4143,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420\/revisions\/4143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}