The Genesis Project

First a bit about my background that you will hear repeated should you ever attend a seminar or presentation that I am doing.  My background is in audio.  I studied piano for 20 years (thanks, Mom).  I received a college degree in Music.  I studied with a fairly famous composer (though he comes from the atonal/12 tone crowd) and I sold ProTools over 10 years ago, when it played 4 tracks and cost about $10,000.  The first job I had in college and afterwards was working the Pro-Audio department of a NJ based Sam Ash Music.

So the point here is that I have a history in audio and can speak from some position of authority.  Consider then, that if you had asked me a few years ago, could you remove a cough from a live music recording, I would have answered, “no, not really.”  That was the truth based upon my experience.  What about fixing the same on videotape?  Audio programs of the day were displaying 2 pieces of information when you looked at them.  They displayed time on the X-axis and amplitude or volume on the Y-axis.  So if I wanted to remove an anomalous event like the cough, you couldn’t without getting rid of everything that was in that space of time. 

In looking at the picture above, with almost 20 years (maybe more) of editing audio via the computer under our belts, this display is very familiar and because of that, we’ve not known about new ways to edit that have been available for the last several years – namely 3 dimensional editing. 

Well, when I joined Adobe a couple of years ago, Audition 1.5 had been out a while but I hadn’t explored it more than what I normally needed for audio.  However, the guys on my team, knowing I had a bit more audio experience showed me some of the demo files that demonstrated Audition’s frequency space editing.  I typically refer to it as Spectral Editing because it looks at the different spectrums of audio (high to low frequencies).  When I first saw it I immediately grasped what I say to you here: that frequency space editing is the first truly revolutionary thing to happen in audio editing in many years.  Let me be clear as well – revolutionary is quite different than evolutionary.  Revolutionary fundamentally changes the way we approach things and that is what spectral editing does for audio and video professionals.

Take a look at the picture below.  Sure, the view is a little freaky, but as soon as you know what you’re looking at, you’ll look at this as quickly as you do the waveform view.  The X-axis is still time, the Y-axis is now frequency as opposed to amplitude and now amplitude is displayed with color that represents our Z-axis.  Black means no volume, bright yellow means very loud.

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The graphic is the same cough file – and you can clearly see the coughs.  Here’s the big sentence, the one you need to remember when using Soundbooth or Audition – If you can see it, you can fix it!  That’s the difference between traditional waveform editing and spectral editing – what you can see and consequently what you can correct.  The way it is done is also cool: we use familiar Photoshop tools to select it.

The thing that prompted me to write this is that despite having this technology out for several years, it still never fails to get an ‘ooh, ahh’ kind of response when we show it.   Once people know about this, it almost inevitably becomes a part of their daily workflow. 

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Hopefully, as time permits, I’ll get the chance to do some tutorials on audio. 

In the meantime, take a look at Hart Shafer's blog on audio at Adobe. 

Hart's Audition

I hope this has sparked your interest in the future of audio editing.