Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Hi,

I have a recording where there is a bang happening during the interview. I'm trying to remove it using Izotope RX but I'm having a hard time isolating the offending sound. Here is a screenshot of the spectral frequency display and I'm attaching that section of the audio that has that bang sound. Can someone tell me where on the spectral frequency display that sound is? Do you think it's possible to remove this sound? I have this banging happening in 3 sections of the recording. It would be nice to be able to remove it

THANK YOU!

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

The bang overlaps speech on a spectrogram here, so it's not easy to get rid of it. You'll need to use Deconstruct instead of Spectral Repair.

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Hi Kathy

Do you have a bit longer clip so we could get a better idea of the pre and post "bang" content - maybe 10 - 15 seconds or so?

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Hi Jim,

Here is the file with more content. Is this enough?

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Thanks Alexey, I don't seem to have Deconstruct in my version of RX, is it part of the Advanced version?

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Yes, it's Advanced-only.

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

:(

Thank you for your help though. May I ask how do you actually know that that's where the bang is on the spectrogram?

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

I have listened to a few selections in your file. My first suspicion was the vertical line before my selection, but it turned out to be letter 'k'. Finally I have arrived at the correct selection.

When you have experience with audio, you can estimate the frequency content of any sound. In your case, it's a noise burst at lows and mids. And it has a considerable decay, due to reverberation.

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Thank you. I also thought it was the vertical line but when I isolated it I learned it wasn't it. Thank you

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

I downloaded the trial of the Advanced version of RX. I won't be able to save it anyway but I thought I would try to see what I could possible achieve but I'm not able to get a good result either. Makes me think it's not possible to remove this. I wish I could at least lessen it. Anyone has any other ideas?

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Can you select the speech harmonics in Izotope? That's the procedure in SpectralLayers.

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

A quick and dirty try with noise reduction in (freeware) Audacity makes some improvement, imperfect but less noticeable. The sound seems to mostly fall between "the" and "com" and between "com" and "part" and by taking small slices of the intervening space and doing a 6 to 12 db reduction on those samples (three) you can get what might pass as a momentary blip that most people would disregard, rather than a burst of hiss that does stand out. Then, applying the sample to the "com" phrase removes some of the underlying hiss without destroying the vocal.
Also reducing the pause after "-mentalization" takes care of the rest. You do it in pieces, a little at a time....

Fortunately this sound falls largely in a pause in the narration, making the reduction samples possible. Now, if the sound is the same in the other places, it might be possible to use the samples from the first situation and apply them (one at a time, obviously) to the others, hopefully then reducing the sound and not affecting the speech too much. (If the second and third sounds overlap the speech, you'd not want to sample there because the speech would be part of the reduction sample.)

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

I don't think so. At least I don't know how

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Thanks, I did the same thing you described but in Izotope Rx and managed to make it less noticeable.

Re: Identifying offending noise by using spectral frequency display
 

Here's what I came up with just for the record