[Audacity] Telephone Effect

[anime_master2005]

Hey guys, I was doing audio editing for my new Black Lagoon The Abridged Series, and there's a fair bit of people talking on the phone that was vital to the plot, so I figured I'd do a tutorial to show you guys how to do it.

EXAMPLE:

THE TELEPHONE EFFECT TAKES PLACE AT 9:20-9:45
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vil3CkPAgYs)

It wouldn't hurt if you watched the entire episode as well and left a comment =P

But enough shameless self-promoting, on with the tutorial.

STEP 1
Open Audacity.

STEP 2
Open your file(s) that you wish to add the effect to.

STEP 3
Select the entire audio form by hitting Ctrl + A

STEP 4
Now go to Effect>Low Pass Filter.

STEP 5
Now go to Effect>High Pass Filter.

STEP 6
Now go to Effect>Compressor.


And that's it! Depending on how muffled you want it to sound, you can additionally repeat steps 4-6, but I don't recommend doing it more than twice, as the audio quality starts to suffer more than you probably want.

Cheers, hope you enjoy, drop a comment if you'd like.

[Midnightmoonproductions]

Thank you so much ^.^ This helped me out big time for my chrono crusade fandub.

[GoldenOtaku]

This will defiantly help me in the near future, thank you :)

[lettuchi]

Thanks so much for this!

[Libra89]

If you have Magix (a music mixing software that can also work for recording and video) then just go to templates and it's right there.

[authortkh]

Thanks! :)

[martialmichael126]

Personally, I open up the equalizer and cut out a majority of the low frequencies and a good amount of the high frequencies.

It essentially ends up looking something like this (only less crude). ______----___

[RebootedMachinim]

Goldwave has a telephone effect.

[reteo]

I was under the impression that exporting audio at 8KHz would be enough to produce the effect.

[InuKai]

Doesn't always work. In my case, it slows everything down or speeds everything up.

[reteo]

Good point. I forgot about that. :-/

[reteo]

One thing you might also want to add if adapting this technique for old-fashioned radio (AM receivers, which had similar sound)... before actually going through the equalization, you might also want to add some faint pink noise; every old-fashioned radio I've ever listened to had mild static at a low level---not enough to affect the clarity of the sound (for the time), but enough that it became noticeable between songs.

This is because of background radiation; radio-wave radiation naturally exist in a static form; the idea is that radio and television transmitters were built with sufficient power to "punch through" the background radiation, thereby becoming listenable when picked up by an antenna. This is why radio and television signals become more faint the further from the transmitter you get, and this is also the reason you get static on channels where nobody's transmitting locally.

I have also remembered watching one flash animation where it demonstrated the frequency range of receivers through time; it seemed almost like each decade added one or two frequency bands on the high and low end of the sound, until the last two decades where speaker technology became capable of outputting sound throughout the entire human-audible spectrum (20Hz to 20Kz), so it's safe to widen the audible channel as the period recommends.