Here's a story about how amazing technology is.

First up: the internet. Going through my daily work-avoidance kata, I found myself ambling through this blog's archives after going looking for something and getting lost. Eventually I stumbled across a review of a Polyphonic Spree show that I wrote a while ago.

That put me into a mood to listen to their latest CD, so on the walk home from work I started playing it through piece of technology number two: the Etymotic earphones that Catherine gave me for my birthday. Then a curious thing happened. Thanks to those little wonders, I heard something I had never heard before. On the final track of the CD (the title track -- "Together We're Heavy"), around the 2:36 mark a woman's voice starts whispering into your left ear. It's very quiet. Too quiet to make out the words.

So after getting home I fired up my copy of Goldwave, grabbed the MP3 off of our music server and started trying to extract the whisper.

Turns out it's a lot harder than they make it look on Alias. I tried a bunch of things, but the most successful seemed to be to throw out the right channel, run a bandpass filter to only keep frequencies within a range that (mostly) included the whispering, then normalize the track to bring the volume back up. Whispering is a nasty thing to extract, though. It's all sibilant and high frequency, with a broad frequency profile and (so far as I no) no one fundamental frequency. It also features occasional bursts of low-end that can't be chopped off without losing a lot of information. If a friendly audio engineer is passing by internet way I'd love to hear what the proper way to do this.

But, for now, this is all that I could come up with. By way of comparison, here's a snippet of the original. The whispering is more isolated, but it's still damn hard to tell what the hell is being said. I can't really make much of it out. I think it begins with "before anybody began ... created a giant banana ... the joint was filled with ...". Yes, I'm perfectly serious. Sounds like a Polyphonic creation myth to me, but I'd love to hear other theories.

I haven't forced my addled ears to listen to much more of this considerable segment of whispering, but if anyone feel like giving it a try, help yourselves.