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I am involved with audience screen tests for movies and want to isolate the audience laughter from the cinema room. Is there any software that could extract the background audio of the film being played in the cinema and leave the laughter. I have the audio of the film clean and wondered if this could be used by a piece of software to extract everything from the recorded audio track that is similar to the film, there by leaving only laughter?

Comments

Codemonkey Wed, 12/09/2009 - 13:41

Phase cancellation. Nice and easy, but requires you to make 2 recordings. If that's not possible, yikes.

After (or before) recording, leave your mics setup (it's critical they don't move), have them play the film again, recording only the empty room + audio noise.

Then phase invert one of the tracks, and mix them both. So your film noise (almost entirely) cancels, leaving only the laughing.

Note that you can do this with as many different audiences as need be - if they're all shown in the same room.

The reason you have to play it in the cinema is because the acoustics of the cinema come into play, making it different.

Now, you could also record a second group of people watching the film (in the same room). You can then phase invert that, but you'll get two lots of laughter which has a microscopic chance of causing artifacts.