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How to "blur" audio?
I'm guessing this is likely a pretty easy effect to achieve, but I'm not quite sure how it's done.
I was listening to The Flaming Lips most recent LP over the weekend and I was hearing parts within the mix that sounded "blurred".
That's the best description I can come up with, ie. similar to how you might blur a photo, or parts of a photo... only, it sounded like some vocals were blurred and mixed either together with "sharp/clear" vocals or some of the chorus sounded like the echoed chorus bits were also "blurred".
I recall the Velvet Machine effect was capable of "blurring", but I'm not sure if that's the same thing.
If my description of "blurred" sound is understood... what is the term used for this in audio and how is it typically done?
Comments
Could you post an audio example?
Which song and at what timecode in the song?
Sounds like a lowpass or bandpass filter could do the trick?
I don't know the song at the moment. I'd just bought it and was streaming it into earbuds while riding my motorcycle.
I don't think it's that important though... as long as someone can imagine what sound would sound like blurred and not clear/sharp.
Agreed or an envelope filter which is pretty much the same territory.
We're talking about this album right?
Lots of filtering and saturation going on in those vocals...
Also... it's not that important to find out. I could likely experiment and find a way to get a similar effect. I just figured I'd ask here in case someone knew exactly what I was describing and how it's typically done. More of a curiosity really.
yes
It could be even simpler recording tricks like putting the microphone under or behind a pillow...
I'll have to listen to it again later and see which specific song it was. It was actually the chorus that sounded more like a created sound.. but on second or third listen, I could make out the blurred out sound was actually the chorus vocal that was blurred so much that it barely sounded like vocal anymore... more like an abstract sound that was once vocal chorus.
I hadn't considered that, but it's definitely a possibility. I think they do a lot of simple recording tricks with kid's toys, and cobbled together homemade electronics that end up sounding like lush orchestrations.
I think 7:40 to 8:00 in the video matches OP's description.
(Outro of "Watching the Lightbugs Glow"?)
As for musical terms I have no idea.
Without listening to the example, I’d say, use a deep reverb, get it increasingly wet
Load into Virtual ANS, and actually blur it with Gaussian blur.
I doubt this is what they did, but you never know 😉
https://www.michaelnorris.info/software/soundmagic-spectral
For OS X only at present...
Spectral smearing or similar?
If by blur you mean some kind of sound freezing effect then the simplest solution is to load white noise as an impulse response into Thafknar and mix to taste.
I'd go with saturation tape plugin , chorus ,then wet plate (small tail) reverb
maybe routing to different channel sending to (fast) phaser and then (short) echo
I like to play with the mix control of the Strymon Bigsky (at the very end of the chain), I always feel like I'm bluring images
I kinda thought this would be one of those really easy questions. So much so that I hesitated even asking it.
I played around with a few fx, LBP, and the free multiband app. I got close but it just sounds more muffled that blurred.
Imagine you've applied a blur filter to a sharp digital photo image. You move the slider control and the image becomes increasingly more blurry. To the extreme, it eventually all goes grey.
If that same blurring from sharp to increasingly less sharp to the point where you can't even make out the words anymore... that's what I'm trying to describe.
My quickie tests got somewhat close, but I could always make out the words, they just sounded like there was a pillow between the source and what's audible. Not increasingly more blurred to the point you could no longer make out the words anymore.
The "smearing" term kinda fits too.
It's hard to read your mind, an audio example would work better
There are some spectral tools that will blur audio in this way. You could check out some of the ApeSoft stuff maybe.
Also reverb and delays can achieve this (if you think about it - reverb is a kind of blurring of sound).
I think I can find it in the apeSoft stuff. I did a quick apeFilter test and got close too. FilterStation2 from Audio Damage might be a good one to play with as well.
This is not the place to go for vague answers. LOL. Most of the people here are either pros or deeply involved in audio production of all kinds.
Please report back on the timeline to illustrate the sound. I tried the 7:40-8:00 and it's
probably NOT the right pointer to the effect in question. Any other guesses appreciated so I don't have to listen to the whole album and guess.
I'm curious to hear "blurring" and then nail down an FX strip of apps to do it. No hurry but let's complete the stay here.
Knowing a little bit about The Flaming Lips and their penchant for weird equipment, it could be something they recorded on an iPhone at a bus stop for all we know.
True... but there are sound specialists here that can provide solutions to these questions
and get you pretty close. Some of the work @rs2000 has done on request in Drambo shows that he's learned a lot about audio processing on his journey... his "Rat" pedal simulation is truly Epic and exposes the powerhouse that is Drambo if you know what you're doing or
put in the trial and error work.
Oh, I have no doubt we have the right people here to answer almost any audio question.
I haven’t listened to the track but ‘blurring’ put me in mind of the trick Stravinsky uses in the Firebird where string sections play the same riff but starting at semiquaver-separated points. So a delay, really, but with no ‘main’ signal - the original and all delays at the same level.
@skiphunt : not an easy question without the audio. "blur" is a vague description that will mean something different to different people. if someone told me they wanted a blurred sound, i'd think they meant a lo-fi timestretch...which is obviously at odds with what others think of as a blurred sound.