My cousin, the famous UU & UCC rogue preacher Beringia Zen, asked me to turn a few cassettes of her sermons into compact discs. The source recordings were noisy, so I attempted some minor reduction with Audacity's built-in Noise Removal tool.

Noise Removal in Audacity works... all too well. In a recording with an ambient reverb backdrop it removes everything even remotely matching the imprint of the noise. Voices take on the qualities of DMT machine elves shifting through your neurological wiring in the high frequencies... it's a comb filter, of sorts.

A main creative methodology in my lab is abuse/misuse of tools. Perhaps, I thought, I should give this a go on drum loops. I did, after applying massive amounts of pristine software reverb. Here's an example:

pusherloop reverberated

pusherloop un-noised

pusherloop deeply un-noised

Better still, here's the effect on harmonically rich sources like bass lines, with some post-effect compression to bring up the tortured sonic remnants:

jamjambass reverberated

jamjambass un-noised

Strange sounds make me feel so good inside.