I used to do this with a razor and an aluminum cutting block.
Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just goes to show that people have very different views. I think when I hear people thinking out loud (ums and ahs) it's a marker that they are actually engaging with the question, thinking through an answer and not bullshitting without thinking.
I agree to you, when it's in person. I think what your describing is mostly the beginning of an answer. Just randoms "um" inbetween because your struggling to build sentences can get annoying both in person and online
Just sit there in silence whilst you cogitate.
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree to you, when it's in person. I think what your describing is mostly the beginning of an answer. Just randoms "um" inbetween because your struggling to build sentences can get annoying both in person and online
Just sit there in silence whilst you cogitate.
this is the move
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#64I accidentally learned how disgusting people’s mouth noises are while developing an audio leveler. The lip smacking and snot noises between sentences are the stuff of nightmares if you don’t do anything to exclude them from amplification. The best approach I could come up with was to maintain a sliding histogram of loudness and exclude the low-level outliers. You can do more in the noise/frequency domain but those we…
Misphonia sufferers unite!
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster. I think it’s a preference for a fast information dopamine hit. I may argue it’s even a shallow approach that prefers against pausing and time for careful reflection. Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.
I listen to podcasts and videos at 2x speed or faster, I can still understand everything and it brings listening time about equal to what my reading time would be if I were reading an article or transcript. Average reading speed is generally about twice as fast as average speaking speed, and in produced media people tend to speak even slower. I realize it sounds insane to hear 2x speed audio if you aren't used to it,…
That reminds me of the blind Microsoft developer that uses a screen reader at a very high speed to code
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just sit there in silence whilst you cogitate.
this is the move
Space fillers are sadly important for group settings where you need to finish a thought before someone interjects.
But hearing them from an interviewee drives me crazy, along with "sort of", "kind of", etc. I once counted all of the "sorta"s in an NPR interview, it was brutal.
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#67It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating th…
The younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster. I think it’s a preference for a fast information dopamine hit. I may argue it’s even a shallow approach that prefers against pausing and time for careful reflection. Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.
i'm not a gen z but I routinely do that. a habit picked up from grad school work and having to assimilate several frameworks and techniques quickly.
arguably clickbait is the reason: i'm not here to listen to the video or all of the other fluff, i'm here to get the point as quickly as possible. it's a 'meeting could have been an email' sort of thing where lots of videos could really just be several bulletpoints.
AI youtubue summarizers are great in that regard.
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#68Doug is a friend, but I actually use this so figured I’d chime in.
I make online course content and used to lose close to a full day cutting filler out of every hour or so of recording. This gets me maybe 70% of that time back. On whether you should even cut them, I don’t think it’s clear cut. With non-native English speakers especially, the um is usually a real pause before they say something that matters, and cutting it makes them choppy or changes what they meant. Most of the time though it’s just padding. That matters more for courses than it sounds like it should, because a common complaint I get is how long courses are, so any dead air I can pull out is time I give back to people.
Anyway this is in my workflow now. Still messing with the settings to get it right, but I like to mess with my stack and this focuses on this step for me.
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I listen to podcasts and videos at 2x speed or faster, I can still understand everything and it brings listening time about equal to what my reading time would be if I were reading an article or transcript. Average reading speed is generally about twice as fast as average speaking speed, and in produced media people tend to speak even slower. I realize it sounds insane to hear 2x speed audio if you aren't used to it,…
That reminds me of the blind Microsoft developer that uses a screen reader at a very high speed to code https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?is=K3nKVrpH-vOSem54
In my limited experience, it seems a high reading speed is common among users of screen readers.
Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
#70It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating th…
A part of saying something like um is to continue your speech and prevent the other person or someone else in the group from interjecting.