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Ideas and technique to help you promote and image radio

Vuvuzela extraction

Posted by on 17 June 2010

Thanks to Lifehacker, here’s a step-by-step guide to extracting vuvuzela noise from a football soundtrack…

And here’s another from something called mocksession.com…

These examples make pretty brutal changes to the sound of the commentary too but if you’re an audio genius with access to proper production kit you may be able to do a better job. Perhaps you already are.

Or you may simply accept that the vuvuzela is part of the story and should be left intact for the sake of truth and, er, safeguarding public trust if not your own sanity.

Anyway, that’s the vuvuzelas extracted. Now where to stick them?

2 Comments

  1. Adam Bowie / Thursday 17 June, 2010

    There was a French company called Audionamix on Five Live this morning boasting about their performance in removing the vuvuzela sound from broadcasts – it’s about 1hr 50mins into this morning’s World Cup Breakfast. They boasted that Canal+ had licenced their services. But a demo (admittedly heard on an AM radio) based around some Five Live commentary showed basically no improvement to my ears.

    From what I can tell, you can take the subtle approach and make little difference, or the heavy handed approach and destroy the underlying audio completely while more thoroughly extracting the vuvuzela sound.

    Personally, like it or not, I think it is part of the sound of this World Cup. It’s being held in South Africa – a country where they play these instruments during games. The games are supposed to be taking on the flavour of the locale aren’t they?

    (That all said, listening to the audio in this YouTube example – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTIQO7EuuT0 – they seem to be a better solution that those above. But it’s hard to tell with YouTube encoded sound. It still sounds a little “metallic” to my ears.)

  2. James Hamilton / Thursday 17 June, 2010

    For all this nay-saying of removing the sound from broadcasts with the excuse of notching out the vuvuzela sample will have an affect on the commentators voices… well, I think the logical thing to do would be to filter it out before the mix on just the atmos mics.

    Having said that, I don’t think it’s really worth removing. Although the BBC could give a “commentators only” audio feed on the red button.

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