Distorting sound files to practise listening.

[imron]

If any of you have done any practise exams for the Advanced HSK, like me, you probably got a bit of a rude awakening in the listening section, where you are required to listen to rapid-fire Mandarin with poor recording quality (i.e. from T.V. or radio).

The problem is, that most listening materials (especially digital ones) usually contain nice, crisp, clear Mandarin, making it difficult to practise listening in poor conditions. An easy way to get around this "problem", is simply to distort the sound files yourself

There is a handy little program for doing just that - Audacity, which allows you to mix, edit and add effects to sound files.

Using this, you take any sound file you have of someone speaking clear Mandarin and distort it/speed it up to make it less intelligble.

To demonstrate what I mean, I've attached an mp3 file that has a couple of seconds of nice clear Mandarin, followed by that same Mandarin sped up and distorted. The effects I used to achieve this were the GVerb effect and the change tempo effect, but there are a whole host of other effects that you can apply to get whatever sort of distortion you like.

HSKaltered.mp3

[Mike]

What a great idea imron! I spend my time trying to get stuff as clear as possible :-) I find telephone conversations (this is in French) difficult because the line quality is poor, you can't see the person, and often I haven't met the person so I don't know their voice or style. So the idea of deliberately practicing with poorer quality is a nice approach. I have used Audacity to quickly record music ideas - dead easy - works really well.

[stephanhodges]

One other idea could be to limit the frequencies of the sound. If you do this, be sure to do the same recording in different bands, so you get training in hearing it different ways.

A good book that talks about listening, hearing, frequency distribution among different languages and geographic location is Dr. Tomatis's book "The Ear and the Voice"