
How to Silence Vuvuzela Horns in World Cup Broadcasts - nreece
http://lifehacker.com/5564085/how-to-silence-vuvuzela-horns-with-an-eq-filter
======
mortenjorck
There was a thread at a music production forum I frequent on a specific Audio
Unit plugin (Mac only, I think) from Prosoniq that does more than just a band
pass, but performs some kind of heuristics to isolate the specific sound and
remove it without cutting other sounds that overlap that frequency (such as
announcer voices).

I haven't tried it, but it has its own site: <http://www.vuvux.com/>

It's free; it appears to be a rather clever "vuvuzela only" demo of their full
de-mixing package.

~~~
LiamAnderson
There's also these Waves presets for anyone owning waves plugins

<http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798>

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patio11
There's a cultural studies paper for anyone who wants it in software
programmers versus throngs of Africans with 5 cent plastic noisemakers.
"Subjugation By Software: How Tech-Savvy Westerners Wrote Africans Out Of The
World Cup In Real Time" would pick up plenty of citations.

~~~
helium
More like: "How Tech-Savvy Westerners found a way to satisfy their complete
cultural ignorance and inability to accept or understand cultures other than
their own"

~~~
tomhoward
Speaking of "complete cultural ignorance", you might want to do a little
research into South Africa's long, splendid history of singing at public
events, which at the football at least, the vuvuzela has largely destroyed.

~~~
helium
No need to do research. I am South African, I live in Johannesburg. I was at a
world cup game on Monday (Netherlands vs Denmark at Soccer City). The
atmosphere was amazing, partly because of the vuvuzelas. I don't care about
the history, they are part and parcel of South African soccer at present, and
makes this world cup unique.

~~~
dutchflyboy
It's possible that live the vuvuzelas are amazing, but on my TV it sounds like
a group of angry bees are flying around, probably because the sound is reduced
to two channels (left, right). But I must say, in the Netherlands vs Denmark
match, the vuvuzelas weren't that awful.

~~~
raeez
Having been to one game so far, I can confirm that the experience is very
different live vs. on-tv.

Then again, I don't find them annoying on tv - so there may be personal bias.

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najirama
I absolutely LOVE the sound of these Vuvuzelas - I don't understand why there
is such a fuss over them.

I find the drone puts me into an almost trance-like state where my focus and
concentration abilities increase dramatically. I imagine I'd quite like having
these things blaring while playing on such a grand stage as the World Cup.

~~~
zalew
I love stadium sounds and I usually hate when broadcasters cut out all the
crowd singing, etc. BUT the vuvuzelas are in such number than instead of
making single horn sounds it's just a 100%
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzz all the game. When you watch one
game, it's ok, when you watch more, or all the games, it's annoying as hell,
rly.

~~~
kilps
It's very different when you're at the game - the vuvuzelas near you are
distinguishable and you can hear people singing.

Obviously that's not ideal for watching it on tv - the vuvuzelas tend to drown
everything else out when it's all recorded - but I'm not sure what the ideal
solution is, because there's no way that anyone here in South Africa would
accept a ban.

~~~
rue
The obvious - and implemented - solution is to adjust the audio signal for TV
viewers.

Everyone wins.

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alrex021
The unfortunate monotonous sound that is heard via the broadcast is nothing
like what it sounds like in the stadium. I was at the Italy - Paraguay game
and it was a very different, awesome, experience.

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crocowhile
I am surprise no broadcaster is still offering a vuvuzela filtered match yet.
edit: ah ok: they are actually doing that.
[http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-
cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce...](http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-
cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce/us/bbc-mulls-vuvuzela-free-option-
viewers?cc=5739&ver=global)

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fhars
If you ask google for mplayer sinesuppress you get a whole page of command
lines that remove vuvuzela sounds from broadcasts, for example:
<http://verbo.se/open-source-vuvuzela-killers>

[edit: fixed link, this supid cell phone doesn't support copy&paste]

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kadhinn
I understand that fans that excited but for those who are not in the stadium
and watching on tv, I am even ready to pay my broadcaster if there is a way
out to mute the honking sound or atleast keep it away when the commentators
are talking!

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zephjc
What, people don't like the sound of the swarms of killer 15 foot bees?
Seriously, they should filter that mess out - it's headache-inducing. Maybe
put the with-vuvuzela sounds on the SAP audio channel.

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fname
There's also this -- antivuvuzelafilter.com -- a noise canceling MP3 for
~$4.00.

EDIT: Yup, you're right. Wasn't until I read more into the details did I
notice what they were doing. Killing the hyperlink to post
<http://isophonics.net/content/whats-all-about-vuvuzela> instead.

~~~
gojomo
Any evidence this isn't a scam? I thought antinoise had to be in close sync
with the source -- requiring an actively adjusting system, rather than a
static MP3.

~~~
ars
Well, you sort of could use a static MP3, as long as you had some way of
adjusting the phase - i.e. pause/unpause it for a moment, randomly till you
get it to match.

~~~
jerf
That will work for an absolutely rigidly pure sine wave of identical
frequency, and even then produces a cancellation moire pattern like this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two-point-interference-
rip...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two-point-interference-ripple-
tank.JPG) , not universal cancellation. Any frequency deviation whatsoever
will produce something different. Trying to use this technique to "cancel"
things that aren't sine waves and aren't even constant frequencies won't have
any cancellation effect, it'll simply be two sounds instead of one.

(Record yourself saying something. Record yourself saying it again. Flip the
phase of one of them and add them to each other. You can do this until the sun
goes out, you'll never get a "cancellation", you'll just get two voices. A
nice effect in some cases, it's one of my favorite things about 60s pop music
even if it got overdone to the point of cliche, but not cancellation.)

Or, to say it another way, that won't work.

It is not possible to universally cancel one wave with another not in the same
position. Noise-cancelling headphones work by, with great effort and with some
fast processing, creating a small zone where frequencies human ears can hear
are dampened to a significant degree where the eardrum is. This comes at the
cost of making it louder in places where the ear drum isn't (which we don't
care about), and IIRC at the cost of some very high frequency noise well above
what we can hear (which we also don't care about). In a way, it's fair to say
they barely work; not in the sense that they are poorly manufactured or
anything, but that it takes great cleverness to get something that works even
as well as they do. There's a reason why they only came to be very recently;
it isn't anywhere near as easy as sticking a microphone on the outside,
inverting the signal, and playing the inverted signal on a headphone speaker,
which could have been done decades ago. That, too, will produce some exciting
acoustic effects, but will only cancel a very small and effectively random
suite of frequencies, and you won't find it useful in general. Noise
cancellation is _just shy_ of impossible, and only works with some heavy
caveats, like having the cancellation equipment extremely proximal to the
audio receiver (ears in our case).

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robotkad
It seems odd that broadcasters wouldn't do this given its such an easy EQ
hack.

~~~
petercooper
I can see the future: TVs will come with a Safari Reader-like "Watchability"
option that wipes out background images and noise and flattens out
imperfections in faces and bodies.

~~~
Raphael
Adblock for billboards within video streams would be amazing.

~~~
GFischer
In many retransmissions, the billboards are digitally replaced with local ads.

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joubert
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286912/WORLD-
CUP-20...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286912/WORLD-
CUP-2010-Vuvuzelas-selling-out.html)

~~~
zackattack
I know this is totally unrelated, but this is a sports thread, and you
recently recommended _Inner Game of Tennis_ to me. I just wanted to let you
know that I read it and loved it.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1435488>

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raeez
As a south african having grown up with vuvzela's present at every sport
match, the present worldwide 'outcry' is quite entertaining.

Don't you just love the smell of globalization in the morning?

~~~
pkulak
What's the point? I mean, why blow on one of those things all match long? I go
to American football games and make a lot of noise, but only when the opposing
offense is lined up to try to get them offside. Otherwise the stadium is
silent. What is the point of constant noise during the entire game?

~~~
verisimilitude
Questioning the purpose of things never seems to go well when the topic is
sports -- the purpose of the whole thing is fun.

~~~
pkulak
I guess I just wonder why laying on a one-note horn for 2 hours is fun.

~~~
nollidge
I don't think anyone does, it's just the additive effect of 30,000 people
blowing them at random intervals is a constant buzz (particularly on TV, when
there's no direction to the audio).

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deadmansshoes
My wife told me I was the most annoying person she'd ever known..I almost
choked on my vuvuzela.

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pcc
There's something rather poignant about this, both funny and sad.

The world could choose any "negative" aspect of the modern South African
situation to complain about and to try to develop nifty hacks for suppressing;
like crime, violence, poverty, the brain drain, etc etc.

But the one that's getting all the attention is that "annoying buzz on the
world's TV sets."

~~~
pcc
Re the downvotes -- I guess this really just goes to show again that either
(a) people really fundamentally care more about a 235Hz buzz on their TVs
during soccer, than they do about _real_ (by comparison) suffering as long as
its someone else who's suffering; or (b) people would just far rather apply
their brainpower to attenuating (or discussing the attenuation of) vuvuzelas,
than to trying to solve actual issues that matter and would be of lasting
value.

