Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Anti-Vuvuzela Filter!

I don't know about you, but I don't like the B flat drone of the Vuvuzela. Some people have come to love it. However there is apparently now an antidote.

The Telegraph reports:
"For just £2.45, armchair fans can download a 45-minute audio clip which purports to cancel out the ear-splitting din of the traditional South African stadium horns during televised matches...The anti-vuvuzela filter is the brainchild of Clemence Schlieweis, 29, a recording and mixing engineer from Munich in Germany. He sampled vuvuzelas from an early World Cup match and created an "inverse" sound wave with the same amplitude as the original, but with the peaks and troughs of the wave reversed. If the MP3 music file is played on a computer placed near television speakers during a game, Mr Schlieweis claims that the two sounds will effectively cancel each other out."

www.antivuvuzelafilter.com/

There is further advice for technically minded folk here to fiddle with settings on your telly:
www.pocket-lint.com/news/33659/get-rid-official-vuvuzela-tv
They warn that they haven't tried the aforementioned anti-vuvuzela filter...

Meanwhile, the BBC are considering the move to cut out the sound using their red button service, but are worried that this will also tune out the commentators' voices – apparently you won't be able to hear the vowel sound "e"!

2 comments:

  1. ''Sounds too good to be true'' is my first reaction. I'm not particularly skilled at physics or acoustics,and I'd love to be wrong, but as I understand it, the principle behind wave inversion is to capture the sound source and broadcast it at the same volume with a delay that is half the wavelength of the original signal. So if the note were middle A (440Hertz), it would have to be combined with the original signal at 880th of a second later. But how would a separate sound source manage to play itself with exactly that delay?

    In practice, I think you'll find that instead of making the drone quieter, you'll end up adding to it. Which is louder, one fanfart* or two?

    *from the words 'fan','fanfare'and 'flatulence.'

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  2. I've got so used to the bloody thing that I didn't notice a wasp or was it a bee right in front of me, trying to work its way out of my office...I think I am immune now...I think it is a good thing in that respect.

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