Being a film maker, sometimes I'm asked to use my equipment to enhance video or sound for a particular reason. A few years back, I was sent footage from a crime scene and asked to examine it with my forensic tools - which I zoomed in, slowed down and blew up so the court could hear and see more clearly what happened. I was officially deemed an "expert witness" in the case.
Here's the CNN clip:
So I've downloaded this film, and I am in the process of examining it. I'm sending it to a forensic audio unit which can examine audio on a variety of levels and settings to see if they can locate the source of this voice on the audio track.
It happens around the 1:50 mark, after the officer calls for "Meadows" - there's a sound, and he responds to it.
But you can clearly hear "something." To my trained ears it does not sound like it's coming from inside the car. I say that because I've listened to a lot of audio tracks, trying to synch lips to lost sound track or trying to match sound to lips, and it's important to "recreate" what it sounds like outside.
However, the police officer responds to the voice that he hears, as if the voice is coming from the car. The only way to triangulate this audio would be to get the audio from another policeman's uniform and examine it as well.
But did the policeman hear a voice? Yes. Can the voice be heard on this audio? Well it's not clear that it is a voice - but there is some kind of sound that can be heard the comes just prior to the policeman saying "We're coming!"
There's a show on National Geographic channel called "Brain Games" where they took an audio file and scrambled it so it was unintelligible. And they surveyed a group of people who could not understand a word from it. And then, they played the tape unadulterated, so you could hear what had originally been said. Then they played the "scrambled" tape again, and the audience, and everyone in the survey could clearly understand the sentence, even though only moments earlier it had been entirely unintelligible.
In fact, you can't "unhear" the audio after your brain has unscrambled it. It's as if the dots have been connected in your brain, and they can't be disconnected upon further review. So I'm going to examine this audio with my equipment, with the equipment from a forensic expert (I wish CNN would do the same) and report back what I can discern. And let's see if we can't verify that this voice is coming from the "Flipside."
Won't that be fun?
Here's the CNN clip:
So I've downloaded this film, and I am in the process of examining it. I'm sending it to a forensic audio unit which can examine audio on a variety of levels and settings to see if they can locate the source of this voice on the audio track.
It happens around the 1:50 mark, after the officer calls for "Meadows" - there's a sound, and he responds to it.
But you can clearly hear "something." To my trained ears it does not sound like it's coming from inside the car. I say that because I've listened to a lot of audio tracks, trying to synch lips to lost sound track or trying to match sound to lips, and it's important to "recreate" what it sounds like outside.
However, the police officer responds to the voice that he hears, as if the voice is coming from the car. The only way to triangulate this audio would be to get the audio from another policeman's uniform and examine it as well.
But did the policeman hear a voice? Yes. Can the voice be heard on this audio? Well it's not clear that it is a voice - but there is some kind of sound that can be heard the comes just prior to the policeman saying "We're coming!"
There's a show on National Geographic channel called "Brain Games" where they took an audio file and scrambled it so it was unintelligible. And they surveyed a group of people who could not understand a word from it. And then, they played the tape unadulterated, so you could hear what had originally been said. Then they played the "scrambled" tape again, and the audience, and everyone in the survey could clearly understand the sentence, even though only moments earlier it had been entirely unintelligible.
In fact, you can't "unhear" the audio after your brain has unscrambled it. It's as if the dots have been connected in your brain, and they can't be disconnected upon further review. So I'm going to examine this audio with my equipment, with the equipment from a forensic expert (I wish CNN would do the same) and report back what I can discern. And let's see if we can't verify that this voice is coming from the "Flipside."
Won't that be fun?
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