Apr 20, 2010

A babel fish for irritating voices

My office workspace is, unfortunately, in some proximity to people who make a lot of telephone calls. They (and there is no nice way to put this) have very irritating voices or patterns of speech. Various options present themselves: I can choose tinnitus leading to some form of deafness, do a van Gogh (but I wouldn't know any ladies of the night to give the item to :-)) , or just take the easy way out and retire to a Trappist monastery.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a device that could either filter out certain voices, or perhaps transform them into more pleasing sounds? So suddenly you have someone saying "so, shall we touch base on Monday as regards the scheduling?" in the voice of say, George Clooney. (Some people think Clooney is the only person who could make you want him to do that to you.)

4 comments:

Jatin Bharadia said...

Something to consider..
http://xkcd.com/462/

Born Free said...

RJ,

If you have an iPhone and willing to keep your headset on during those irritating times, I have an application that can do "noise" cancellation.

Shridhar

J Ramanand said...

Jatin: oh no... But then I understand he is a man who can get things.

Shridhar: don't have an iPhone, I'm afraid. But now I know one more reason to get it :-)

Roshan said...

I assume you have considered some of the obvious options already - noise cancellation headsets or jamming an the IEM to block out all noise. :p

I've experienced some DSPs where the audio pitch can be changed from male to female and vice-versa for any song being played back. I'm not too sure if Clooney's can be cloned though.

Btw, background noise can be a great excuse for those creeping bugs in your code. So let it pass...