How does audio ducking improve understandability in real-time communications?
On Episode 91 of WebRTC Live, guest James Meier of Synervoz explains an essential tool for audio processing in real-time communication when putting content and human voice together: audio ducking.
Watch the full episode at https://youtube.com/live/_7C6bJHP5QU
Read episode highlights and key insights on the WebRTC.ventures blog: https://webrtc.ventures/2024/05/watch...
“Audio ducking is a tool that audio engineers are very familiar with. Basically, you have a key input and a main input, which is probably playing music, so whenever there's a signal on the key input, the music will turn down. So it basically makes space inside of maybe that music to signal for something else. A lot of disco would use ducking to really bring the bass drum forward. But it turns out that it's also very helpful for understandability and communication when you're putting content and human voice together. So what we like to do is we like to duck the music keyed against the human voice. So we're listening to music, we're hanging out. It's just a very kind of third-space kind of experience. When I start talking, to music comes down a little, and that makes my voice a lot more understandable.
So if you're talking about listening parties or watch parties where you might be watching TV or a movie together, playing certain games together, there's this sort of other audio source you're otherwise going to have masked against the voice-over IP signal. Ducking helps that.”
#webrtc #audioprocessing #audioducking #watchparties