How to edit audio files without using an audio editor

I paraphrased the title of this album of Sonic Youth to explain my last experiment : create and edit audio from code and, if possible, automate the whole creation process. The goal of this experiment was not to produce an actual entire hour-long podcast (yet) but to find out if and how to do it.

Original Photo : Roman Pohorecki

TL;DR & Final Result

I used Sonic Pi and some other tools to edit audio from code and command line only.

Final result on Soundcloud

From script to result

Let’s say you have some cool voice records, an interview for example, or a speech of Greta Thunberg at the United Nations and you want to create a cool podcast out of it. You might script something like :

I would like to hear her first sentence, with a cool ambient sound in the backgound, let’s say, some rainy atmosphere

“Oh yes”, your friends would say, “then you should pause her speech for a few seconds, and add some more ambient sound, and make it sound darker”

Then you could play some other parts of her speech, and add music to it at a specific moment for drama

And this would be the script of your short podcast (for the sake of this article, I’ll stick to it)

Turning it into a podcast would normally imply to download the speech from a youtube-to-mp3 service, a multi-track audio editor, finding some cool sounds, and start to manually realize your script, turning it into to a real thing by cut-organizing sounds on the timeline of the audio editor, add effects, manage volume and balance, etc.

But what if we could use a computer script to turn your litteral script into a podcast ? Code is litterally a scripted text to turn data into stuff, right ?

You might, or might not, have already heard of Sonic Pi. It’s a small software/coding environment (based on Ruby language) allowing people to create music from code, that is : turning written instructions into sound.

It might sound complicated but it’s actually pretty simple :

You tell the computer to play a sound from a file

Then another one with a reverb effect

Then synth notes in a given order

Then loop back to the start

And it came to my mind that we could actually use it to script a podcast rather than editing it in a dedicated software …