Variable Speed Playback

Speeding up or slowing down an audio signal has applications from survelliance to medical and therapeutic uses. Changing the speed of an audio signal is not as simple as changing the sampling rate, because this will also change the pitch accordingly. Instead, we need to be more selective about how we construct the new signal at the altered time scale. One of the most promising methods is the Weighted Similarity Overlap and Add (WSOLA) technique by Verhelst and Roelands. This technique stores a portion of the input signal, and computes a similarity measure across time that gives information about which portions of the input to save for reconstruction. It is computationally ecient because the most heavy lifting is computing the similarity measure and that is done only once per frame. An ecient similarity measure is the magnitude dierence function. The WSOLA method is a good baseline method, but to implement it, some corner cases need to be handled. Noise is a big impediment to the accuracy of the method, as the similarity between two segments decreases in the presence of noise. Similarly, reconstructing many noise only segments can introduce an envelope periodicity that is percieved as a tone like sound. These problems can be handled by rst performing noise reduction. Alternatively, the latter problem can be handled by randomizing the phase of adjoining noise segments in order to disrupt the developing pattern. Frequency domain similarity measures can be used when integrated into other speech enhancement algorithms. Similarly, LPC analysis can be used to compute similarity. Finally, subsampling the signal can also result in computational savings.