Removing man made sounds from a nature recording with Isotope RX10

25/30 years ago, I could record sounds with minimal interference from man and his noisy self…
Today with over 7.9 billion people on the planet, we are making an awful din…
It’s nearly impossible to get away from planes, cars, leaf blowers, motor bikes. Cellphone interference.
I used to seriously stress out with the amount of planes that fly overhead. In fact, where I live in Florida, there are over 10k planes that use flightpaths and over 24k planes in any 15 hour day across the USA
Most of my recordings in the last 25 years are polluted by man made noises in some way but in the last 15 years its steadily gotten worse.
I could never imagine there would be the need for software to filter out these sounds back then but oh boy do I need it now….
Welcome to Isotope RX….
I’m going to show you how to take away planes and other man made noises from my recordings.
Just a note, what I’m about to show you isn’t easy in all recordings.
This recording is of a white crowned sparrow, you can see, the frequency is fortunately higher than the plane that encroaches the recording.
A lot of birds sing and call in higher frequencies than our racket making it easier to filter out but some other birds like doves and pigeons can call in the frequencies that occupy man made noises.
To filter out these unwanted sounds we need to be in Spectral view. A normal wave file shows us nothing but a wave.
Spectral view shows us all the frequencies in the soundscape.
Time runs from left to right and at the righthand side, frequency goes from 0 Htz to 20kHz
The bird singing starts around 2khz upwards to 7Khz and its harmonics go up to 20Khz
Most of the man made noise is from 2khz down to 50Htz
We are going to replace that lower band with a recording from a quieter recording I made.
This program allows you to capture other ambiences in a module called Ambience match;
If you have quieter unpolluted recordings, you can make your own presets from the,
The one I have here is from the Arctic refuge I recorded during quiet times….
The preset I have is called no noise….
What you basically have to make sure is that the amplitude is relevant to the recording otherwise you lose the natural feel of the environment.
You can play around with these settings but I generally use static and play around with the gain making sure Output ambience is checked.
Again, it depends of the strength of the sounds you want to replace.
I can select just certain areas and isolate the sounds to make sure by selecting the frequency select play button.
I think the fainter sounds are that of an American robin.
We don’t want to destroy that.
I’ll take the Lasso tool and paint around the Sparrow.
Once I’m happy I have everything selected that I want to replace, I’ll select the render button.
Boom…. The plane has gone…..
Now as I said, it’s not that easy with every recording and a lot more time can be spent painting out unwanted noises.
If I’m requested I’ll do one for you at a later time.
I hope this helps in some way.
I’ll leave the Izotope link below and in the meantime. Please subscribe to the channel and click the bell….
Thanks for stopping by ..
www.thelisteni...
www.izotope.com
#thelisteningplanet
#naturesounds
#noisereduction
#izotope