removing hammering noise behind speech

Question

Rather unfortunate hammering noise presents itself in some footage I am processing, where the source of the sounds may actually be the heating / boiler in the building.

You can hear it here (in the video).

Any idea how to remove it, I tried Noise Reduction in Adobe Audition CS6, but that did not help?

Answer 1

Some things to consider:

• Try some audio dynamic range compression - typically just called a 'compressor' plugin, but this is different from data compression. Since the voice is much louder than the hammering (I had to play it a few times to hear it), you might be able to set the knee somewhere between the level of the hammer and the voice and amp up the voice part. Multiband compression may also help, though the transient attack of the hammering sound probably covers a lot of spectrum space.

• If you have access to it, give Melodyne DNA a try. Although it was designed for editing individual notes, that is essentially what you want to do - pull out the 'notes' of the hammering while keeping the dialog.

• Finally, there are a number of free or open-source frequency domain audio editors that may help. SPEAR is one that I've played with, but there are several others out there.