Effects doing the opposite of distortion/destruction? "Making audio beautiful"?

[Aleatoriac]

Trying to emulate Aksun

[deastman]

One word: lipstick

[xx JPRacer xx]

Make every instruments a sine wave.

[MogwaiBoy]

Valhalla Shimmer - instant beautifier

[DJ Warmonger]

Distortion is a nonlinear process that results in information loss. There's no way to reverse it.

[VariKusBrainZ]

You need to try noitrotsid, its perfect for this

. Yes, it applies the inverse function, as described above. Airwondows does a great job!

Yup, this is how digital forensics unblur photographs were people apply a blur to hide identity for example, its nothing new

[Michael L]

You need to try noitrotsid, its perfect for this

. Yes, it applies the inverse function, as described above. Airwondows does a great job!

Yup, this is how digital forensics unblur photographs were people apply a blur to hide identity for example, its nothing new

Well that's an understatement! Fourier developed his 'transform' algorithm in 1822, based on Gauss' work in 1805.
But this is the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT). Wikipedia presents it in the first sentence:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform
And a famous example of musical unblurring using IFFT - Aphex Twin:
https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions ... hesis-work

[Britishboxer]

Hi guys,

now there are trillions of bitcrushers and distortion effects. I am wondering if there is the opposite. Effects which aim to make the audio more beautiful. As in, e.g., "glue all the desctroyed bits together in order to tame it, to make it sound beautiful again"... Smearing.. Blurring?

I don't know exactly and from my idea I see warbling results on the horizon or maybe looong tail reverb style stuff like Valhalla Shimmer...

Your ideas please Maybe there are interesting concepts out there.
Thx

distortion can be undone with audio plugins on Mac, https://apmastering.com/plugins/reverser ruling the frequencies

[foosnark]

distortion can be undone with audio plugins on Mac, https://apmastering.com/plugins/reverser ruling the frequencies

Certain types of distortion can be undone if you have a well-known, simple transfer function (the example you link to uses tanh) that doesn't clip, fold, or double back on itself in any way AND you haven't further processed the audio after distortion.

That's not a common case.

[jamcat]

If you want to undo distortion, you need to identify what it is and then do the opposite. So, since distortion is achieved with a hyperbolic tangent, you need to apply its inverse, artanh(x)

[foosnark]

But yeah, as a sort of philosophical equivalent of "the opposite of distortion" I agree generally with lowpass filtering and some reverb. With a long washy reverb, you can still re-apply the amplitude envelope of the input signal so it just has the smearing effect rather than a long tail.

Bandpass filtering (or parallel bandpass / formant, or spectral processing) can also stand in for lowpass.

Usually it's going to be a pretty radical transformation, if you're trying to turn distorted harsh sounds into smoother and prettier ones. So don't be afraid to process the hell out of it. Granular stuff can work too, to re-texture it. Or disrupt the existing texture with another one, with ringmod or AM or stuttering white noise or something.

Sometimes when I have unexpected/unwanted "crunch" in my sound, probably from one of my Eurorack modules clipping while I was recording, I will use ZPlane Peel to isolate a particular band, and then stick either a transient processor or a reverb (preferably Velvet Machine) inside of that band. With the kind of music I make, usually I can smear away texture/transients somewhere in the 6-12Khz range or so and it's relatively transparent. If not, I can mask it by intentionally layering something else in that range.

Sometimes I use a nice sounding distortion to mask a less nice or unintentional distortion. I've used Wavesfactory Casette for that -- really push the saturation and then roll off the highs, instead of just filtering/EQing it down.

[Transfigurationsofbeing]

Also check out Moodal, a resonator effect.

I thought about something like Moodal too, but not as a single plugin to apply. To make sound sounds like silk, you have to surgically EQ it both technically and tonally, take it to the chiropractor (multiband comoressor) to align its chakras; then run it through *Soothe2* or something similar, and apply Moodal but only in some area. I also would try saturators like Native X 6 (SSL) or Saphira Cobalt (Waves). —If you are searching an answer for one plugin, I would say it's Soothe (spectral plugins).

[billinder33]

Surprised no one has released an AI undistort plug-in by now. Actually seems like a good use case for AI.

[Music Engineer]

There is this whole genre of "audio restoration" algorithms - de-noise, de-hum, de-crackle, de-clip, etc. Some of those algorithms necessarily involve some sort of (intelligent) guesswork, what the original signal may have been. As mentioned - minimum phase EQ can be undone. But you better know the settings of the original EQ - or else, it's again guesswork. The same goes for strictly monotonic waveshaping functions - you can (in principle) undo a tanh saturation by a simple atanh (except when the tanh distortion involved oversampling with subsequent downsampling). But again - you need to know the exact settings of the original distortion. With bitcrushing - it's again guesswork because a bitcrusher transfer function is not strictly monotonic. Yeah - I also think, that this restoration business may be a good task for AI.

[sokoleski]

Gullfoss ?

Hornet - ThirtyOne ?