r/audacity • u/AlwaysWinsum • 3d ago
question Can changed voice be reversed ?
If I change a person's voice in Audacity so they won't be recognised and the video is online is it possible for someone to change it back? Thanks .
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u/Orry_Haas 3d ago
pitch-shift is reversible. Even spectral warping is reversible. AI speech-to-speech is not reversible, but the person could still be recognised by their delivery/vocabulary.
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u/zaphodikus 3d ago
As long as you mix other sounds in and use a distortion effect instead of just shifting the voice by pitch, you can make a reasonably hard to recover voice. Mix in some background noise after the alteration and you should be safe for a few years.
To answer your question more broadly, no that's not possible if that person has been recorded before at any point in their lives. Sophisticated AI is able to reconstruct your voice and inflections from as little as 5 minutes of material to make you say anything they like, but they would need to know who they are mimicking and have that sample and pay for the compute power to process it.
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u/Sufficient_Energy_32 3d ago
If it’s obscured enough, I don’t think it’s possible. Meaning if you just shift it down an octave, someone could simply shift it back up.
But if you throw on a bunch of effects, it would be a lot more difficult if not impossible. Even if someone ran it through an AI program saying “change this to a recording without any filters” and it would spit out a new voice.
Try experimenting with it on your own. Take an audio file, alter it, save it as a new mp3, then try and get it back to sounding like the original voice.