Does the audio recording exhibit poor speech intelligibility, extreme noise or other artefacts?
Can an audio recording be cleaned up and enhanced while preserving its integrity?
If you are in need of forensic audio enhancement you’ll more likely have a recording that may have encountered the following:
- Recorded in a sub-optimal acoustic environment and/or with the recording device placed in a non optimal position
- The codec settings the digital device uses were not set optimally to obtain the best performance.
- The recording suffers from acoustical noise, broadband noise, intelligibility in speech is poor.
Although processes such as noise reduction, hum removal, equalisation and dynamic optimisation may seem straight forward to anyone having access to these kinds of tools, preserving the integrity of the evidence, if the recording is going to be submitted as evidence in court, may prove a challenging task without providing accurate representations of the events as they occurred.
The purpose of this task is to remove the unwanted audio and preserve as well as enhance the elements surrounding the desired audio. Some examples are removing static noise, eliminating interference caused by cellular phones, clearing up random noises such as birds chirping, dogs barking, bells ringing, etc.
The enhancement process can be applied in an audio recording in which speech intelligibility is poor and needs to be improved, has some kind of background or foreground noise disturbance which needs to be removed, or eliminated or any other sound artefact that interferes with it.