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Silence those Vuvuzelas!
July 5th, 2010 by scaredpoet

The Vuvuzela. For some, it’s a symbol of revelry for the FIFA World Cup fans. For others, it’s a horrible bane on humanity’s existence. The beeswarm drone of thousands of soccer fans blowing away at these horns drowns out everything else. It’s even been parodied by Youtube, which now allows you add this annoyance to any video you like.

But not to be outdone, the Anti-Vuvuzelistas have come up with their own coutermeasure: a Vuvuzela filter. With a few days left to the World Cup Finals, Prosoniq has introduced VuvuX, a filter that specifically removes Vuvuzela pollution from audio:

The process used in VuvuX has been developed to distinguish between voice, Vuvuzela hum and background noise by applying pattern detection and tracking.

The website offers up some examples of filtered audio, using both a standard notch filter (with poor results) and the dynamic VuvuX filter (which sounds amazingly good).  Here’s another example of the filter in action:

Audio: vuvuxinaction (MP3 file, 512KB)

The good news: VuvuX is free! The bad news: the free audio plugin is only available for Mac users. Because, Macs rule.

But fear not Windows or linux users. An SDK exists for incorporating this filter into other software tools. And, a commercial implementation called NoVuVu for both Mac and Windows is available for just €9.95 (as of this writing, about $12.48 for those of us who call the sport “soccer”).


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