🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello:

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate newsgroup to post this; but here
goes anyway. If there's a better place to post it, please let me know.

Here is a problem I hope you can help me with.

I'm involved in a research project--very complicated affair, so on and
so forth. One of the tasks I and a fellow graduate student are
expected to perform is interviewing a dozen or so "principle
investigators" involved in this project--medical doctors and college
professors, mainly. These people have proven to be by and large
difficult to find, very busy and therefore are reluctant to spend time
talking with us, and generally difficult to interview.  Nevertheless,
we managed to do so, talking with each of them for about an hour each,
recording our questions and their answers on tape.

A couple of days ago I received a frantic call from my fellow worker.
It seems that the tape recorder she was using to interview these
people somehow malfunctioned during three of the interviews she did
(we had split the job up, and each of us had six people to interview).
To make a long story short, it seems that the condensor microphone in
the unit wasn't properly grounded or whatever, and that there is a
very persistant and annoying sixty-cycle AC hum masking the voices on
the tape. Uh oh.

Now, the frustrating thing is that it is almost possible to decipher
the voices behind the buzz. Almost. If you turn the volume up,
naturally the noise increases as well, and so it's a futile attempt.
And so I had the idea of using a graphic equalizer to filter out some
of the noise. Here is what I am going to try to do, and what I would
like you to comment on as to the possibility of success. I will use
two tape recorders, the graphic equalizer (when I find one) in line
between them. I will use headphones to mask out as much of the buzz as
is possible using the graphic equalizer, and duplicate the equalized
signal on recorder number two; I'll boost the overall level of signal
in the process, thus hopefully amplifying the voices. Then, if I still
can't make out the tapes, I'll do the same thing again, placing the
recording into tape player number one, masking and boosting the
signal, then recording again on a third tape. What I'm trying to do is
recursively filter out the bad frequencies while boosting enough of
the good frequencies to make out the dialog.

What do you think of my chances of making this work? Anyone out there
ever try this? Any other techniques I should try? Obviously I don't
have a whole lot of financial resources, but I'm all ears to any
technique that might be of help.


Many thanks for taking the time to read and reply.

--ken zuroski

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