Have volunteered to assist a mother who has lost her child in its infant years. Has managed to find a video of baby scan where the heart beat is audible. Am wanting to enhance to put in a stuffed toy for her comfort and solace. Any tips or ideas?

 

wow. sorry to hear about this circumstance but good work offering assistance


A few years ago my bro-in-law managed to record my niece saying I love you Mommy for the first time. I took the recording and added it to a playback device similar to this* . Then had a tailor sew into to a doll I had made of the child and now we have a treasure forever. Not especially complicated but my sister was moved to tears <3

*


Stuffed Animal Recorder Insert

This worked a charm for our purposes but for your request I would look for something with either a long playback time or a loop function.

If you are asking about how to treat the actual sound: mix your levels and I would think a calm reverb would be a nice touch. If it's a murky sound, what about tuning up a kick drum to emulate the pitch/presence of the heartbeat?


edit: maybe this is of interest? guide to different sounds of pregnancy development

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 9, 2018

I'd recommend some audio cleaning software like izotopeRX or some eq'ing to tone down background noises and make the heartbeat more focused. The heartbeat is in the lower frequencies so you can try eq'ing like a kick drum. Very sad indeed.

 

Use the audio from the video to trigger a better sounding sample possibly? Just a suggestion. There's triggering software out the usually used for drum triggering.
Trigger2 from Slate is one example. I've used it to trigger a handclap from the snare track.

 

Agreed. Also, Audacity could do a good cleanup job if one can sample the audio excerpt's noise floor and use it as reference.
Here are two examples, taken from a videoclip of an ultrasound foetal scan. I cleaned up the first clip with RX6. The second clip was processed with with Audacity.





@chippy33 - please feel free to do whatever you like with either one (or both) of the above soundclips, or ignore them completely. I don't mind.

 

Last edited: Aug 9, 2018

Great advice from you all. Many thanks. I'm using Cubase 9.5 and wavelab, also have izotope plugs and waves. I have to work with original audio as mother has supplied and just requires the heartbeat being louder. My initial thought was import audio from video, then cut all none beat sections and leave silence. Had not considered the length as one video only 10 secs and other 1.24 mins but not entirely of heartbeat. The idea of looping makes sense and reverb should help to sit it in mix. As volume was main issue was going to use a maximizer on main out but am aware that the noise level will also increase. Should I be worried about sampling/playback rate of device?

 

As DarthFader already said, taking a noise print to reduce the background noise (with free Audacity) should do fine and since such recordings are not highest fidelity the sample rate shouldn't be an issue.

 

Transgressor. Use the eq section where the heartbeat is the loudest and crank that up. And with some audio restoration to get rid of background noise you should get a pretty solid sound.