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Can you XOR sound waves?
Can you XOR sound waves? Kind of like images as seen here https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/xor.htm
I thought of this question when listening to a song that I didn’t really like the lyrics of but I liked the instrumental. So I thought what if I XORed the original song with the lyrics and get the instrumental part. But is this possible?
1 Answer
- Robert JLv 73 years ago
XORing is functionally single-bit multiplication with no carry. The audio equivalent is a ring modulator, which has been common for synthesis and audio effects for decades.
Cancelling out is simple subtraction. You can do that with an audio editor such as Audacity.
There is a well-known trick with Audacity where you invert one channel of stereo audio then add the two channels.
That cancels out audio that is identical on both channels - the centre of the stereo image. Audio further away from centre is progressively less affected and things that only exist in one channel are unaffected.
It is claimed to remove vocals but actually removes all the centre of the stereo image and distorts a lot of the remainder. All that is left is the difference between the left & right channels.
If you had an absolutely perfect copy of the vocal track alone from the same performance and matched in level, you could theoretically subtract it, so cancel out the vocal in a finished, mixed track - but any difference at all from microsecond to microsecond or microscopic level difference and you would just get an echo or chorus effect, mixing the second vocal with the track.
