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Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

Good video. It's a shame that his voice over is in that "TED talk" cadence where people pause as if everything they say is mind blowing.

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Pretty sure his channel is successful due in no small part to his voice. It couldn't not be, considering the whole thing is just voiceovers. You also often see people commenting as such on his videos.

He takes great care of that; I remember him mentioning some early video, where he laboriously edited out the plosives (hissing sounds) out of his recorded voiceover

He spoke about that in a recent podcast as well. He really hates mouth noises in general so he takes the time to fix all of that in post. Quite alot of work.

I wonder how many people are doing that much extra work behind the scenes. Ross Scott was recently talking about manually editing out some very subtle sound that wasn't being filtered out from certain words.

You can remove alot of it with mic choice/technique, in the same ways that you can enhance it.

There are also plugins that take care of at least most of it now, but it's not going to get rid of every instance of it. In current year, if you want 100% of it, it makes more sense to just train a model on your speech and fake all of the audio instead of recording it, then re-record only the parts you don't find acceptable.

Do you know of any free and open source voice cloning models? I once read a suggestion to use a recording of one's own voice as an alarm clock, as we respond strongly more our own voices. Perhaps there is some nascent narcissism of mine to be developed for fun and profit!

I think I know what you mean, but the idea of "hating mouth noises" meant literally is funny to me because that's all that speech is

The sound of voice is largely a result of things happening behind the mouth, in the throat. I think most of what people refer to when they say mouth noises is lips and cheeks.

Your username is hilariously appropriate for someone commenting on what the most significant part of human speech is!

Munching sounds, those can... Be distracting. Some super sensitive microphones seem to pick up those a lot more than a human ear

I thought that only vowels were considered to be "throat" sounds, and that most consonants came from the mouth? I guess a lot of them from tongue and teeth (like "s", and "t"), but I'm not sure how I could make an "m" or a "p" sound without using my lips

When you make a noise from the voicebox, the noise is what's heard. It's modulated by the lips and tongue but the lips and tongue don't add noises, they just envelope them.

You have a point about "s" and "th" which is a whistling between tongue and palate.

This also made his voice unusually easy to clone, so there's an early AI parody of him called NileGreen.

Just put it at 2x speed, you don't even have to fiddle with the console anymore the controls are built into the player.

when did you have to do that?

Nit since Google picked up YouTube, at least.. really, idk for sure but I have been speeding up videos for a long, long time on YouTube and can't recall ever using the console.

I think the pauses are to sync up the narration with the video clips?

The man has an entertaining channel with amazing chemistry experiments, millions of subscribers, hundreds of millions of views, and a career making videos on youtube. It's a shame you're such an overly judgmental dullard.

I hesitate to wade into this but he does not do interesting chemistry. I am deep into chemistry YouTube and followed Nile red since literally his first year on the site. He has wonderful presentation, clean videography, and great presentation. But his chemistry is some of the most rudimentary in the scene.

On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and borderline unwatchable.

> On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and borderline unwatchable.

Thanks, subbed to him!

Thoisoi is also good but has a heavy Russian (Estonian?) accent, which I didn't mind but seems to have bothered him enough that he's gotten someone to dub him over now.

Also StyroPyro for an electrical mad scientist version.

…now that I go look at his channel apparently Thoisoi's lab just burned down.

I think you're reading too much into the pauses, because his style is meant to be the equivalent of a lab writeup documenting his process.

Immediately noticed the same thing and makes watching the videos painful. Just speak like a human being.

Funny way to put it

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