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October 19, 2023
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If a podcast guest or host has an excruciatingly slow pace of delivery, there are a couple ways to speed up the audio to make it seem like they have a bit more energy than they do.
1. Time Stretch: Most audio editing software allow you to time stretch audio. This means that if the initial length of a piece of audio is one minute, you can stretch it out to be one minute and 15 seconds, which would draw it out and slow down the pace. But you can use the same tool to get the opposite effect; you can transform that one minute segment to be only 50 seconds long, for instance. And the pitch can be retained as well so you don’t create that chipmunk sound. This means that the person’s delivery will be considerably sped up, and less excruciating. Keep in mind that when you stretch/compress audio like this, the more you stretch or compress the more you will destroy the quality of the audio. In fact some software’s time stretch processing is not that good to begin with, so be very careful not to use this type of processing too extremely. Making a one minute segment 50 seconds long might be OK, but if you tried to make it 30 seconds long it will sound absolutely terrible.
2. Tighten up the spaces between sentences a bit. Now with this, there’s only so much silence you can remove before the timing will sound totally unnatural. But removing just a bit of silence will go a long way toward giving the perception that the speaker has more energy and is speaking more quickly.
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One Response
I use the second method to tighten up pretty much every podcast I produce. If nothing else because I’m checking this track against track it will take out internet lag between host questions and the answers from the guest. I use the truncate silence function in Audacity and usually find a good “noise floor” dB basis and then reduce any silence longer than .25 seconds to 20% of the original length. That to me ends up sounds natural still but just reduces the down time between phrases or “thinking” that my hosts sometimes do and creates a much more tight and flowing podcast. Now if I could just give myself the time to remove all the elongated UMMMMMM’s/voice creaks that I have to deal with it could find a way to make those shorter/removed automatically I’d have a pretty magical workflow!