Post by YTIFB on May 26, 2006 13:31:25 GMT -5
Terri said:
As pointed out above, its quite possible to edit audio tape. I'de be suspicious of a tape used in this way by either workers or anyone else. I would not be surprised that the Canada tapes were edited in this way.I have news for anyone that is thinking of trying this... You have your work cut out for you!
When you listen to audio, even with no A/V training, your brain picks up cues like background noise, vocal volume gradients/inflections, vocal tonal gradients/inflections, vocal stress, merged word transitions, etc. If these cues are missing or irregular, you will know on a conscious level that something is wrong with the audio. This is true even if you've never heard the speaker before.
Modifying audio so that someone who said "I don't hate dogs" can be heard to say "I hate dogs" is very difficult. In some cases, doing it so that it is believable is impossible. When it is possible, even with the best training and equipment available, it can take days of careful work to make it believable. (Professional speakers, especially politicians, often employ a number of tactics to ensure that their words cannot be taken out of context in this way.)
Modifying audio by taking a volume of words from a brief series of statements and cutting them up and rearranging them to create an entirely new statement or series of statements is... well, one small step from insanely impossible. To make it believable, even to the average listener, you would have to process every millisecond of the audio to ensure that all of the cues that I mentioned earlier sound natural. This would take forever. I'm sorry, but I just don't see that this is possible, with todays techniques and equipment, anyway.
About the only form of audio manipulation that is reasonably possible is simply cutting away the beginning and/or end of a sound clip. This is done all the time in the media.