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Comment by relwin | Hacker News Reader

I used this filter to reduce wind noise during a tour guide of BB63:

This is a 20 yr old vid shot at Pearl Harbor on the deck of USS Missouri with a low-end consumer Hi-8 camera using built-in mics. Notice flags and clothes rippling in the wind. This filter works pretty well in this case. Maybe it was trained on a New York accent? Mixing in the enhanced track as needed works well. Using only the enhanced track may sound artificial at times.

Here's another vid shot at a brewery where this filter helped clarify the brewmaster's voice over a noisy restaurant and outdoor machinery (again, built-in mic):

https://youtu.be/nANSdnYj-R0

I found this filter useful.

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> Mixing in the enhanced track as needed works well. Using only the enhanced track may sound artificial at times.

Funnily, in order to use this sort of model for tasks involving speech recognition it's often recommended in the literature to mix back in some of the original noisy audio. This reduces the impact of artifacts introduced by the enhancement which would otherwise reduce ASR quality due to domain shift in the data.

Guess humans and computers have similar needs in this case. :)

These are impressive results, the audio mostly sounds like you gave the guy a lapel mic. :P

As a human I had a hard time understanding that audio

Honestly you might have had a hard time understanding that speech in person

Having unlisted version on Youtube “before” the audio was filtered would make it easier to hear the true difference, but agree the quality is impressive as is.

I did so on the brewery tour:

https://youtu.be/M5pdHVoXQHE

Thanks! Honestly I liked the post filtering audio with no “natural audio” mixed back in. Get the reasoning, but still. Did you do testing with anyone to gauge viewer preference? If so, how?

This filter is not perfect so you'll have a few audio artifacts that you won't want in your final mix. Mixing with the original audio hides these artifacts somewhat. Using this filter also increases your audio mixing effort (you're mixing in a second vocal track) so it's easiest to mix the 2 audio tracks at constant levels then adjust when you hit an artifact. This is my personal preference on this style of audio mixing, and others who watched (and gave feedback) couldn't tell it was enhanced and had no difficulty understanding the speaker.

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