Alright, let’s talk about the second round with this ‘silver haired echo trainer’ project. After the first attempt, well, things weren’t quite hitting the mark. The sound was okay-ish, but it missed that… character, you know? The ‘silver haired’ part felt a bit forced, too clean. Needed more life, more natural feeling to it.
So, I decided to dive back in. Fired up the setup again. This time, I figured the main problem might be the source material I fed it last time. It was too uniform, maybe too polished.
Getting Started Again
First thing I did was hunt down some different audio samples. I didn’t just want clean recordings. I looked for stuff with a bit more… realness. Think slightly noisy backgrounds, maybe the odd cough or pause that felt natural. Spent a good while just listening, picking out bits I thought had potential. It wasn’t about perfect studio quality; it was about capturing that slightly worn, lived-in sound.
Then came the tedious part. Cleaning up just enough. Didn’t want to sterilize the audio like last time. Used my usual simple software, mostly just tweaking levels, maybe cutting out really jarring background bangs or clicks, but leaving in the smaller imperfections. This felt more like art than science, just going by ear mostly.
The Training Process – Take Two
Once I had a new batch of audio ready, I loaded it into the training system. I kept some of the settings from the first run but tweaked a few parameters based on my notes. Specifically, I tried to make the system a bit more tolerant of variations in pitch and speed. The idea was to let it learn the inconsistency that makes a voice sound human, especially an older one.
Here’s roughly what I did next:
- Loaded the new, ‘imperfect’ audio dataset.
- Adjusted the learning rate slightly – made it a bit slower, hoping it would pick up more nuances.
- Specifically targeted the parameters related to rhythm and pausing. Last time it felt too metronomic.
- Kicked off the training sequence. Again. And waited.
This part always tests your patience. You hit go, and then… you watch the progress bars, check the logs. For the first few hours, honestly, I wasn’t sure. The initial outputs sounded messy, worse than before even. Had a moment thinking, “Uh oh, maybe this was a bad idea.”
Hitting a Stride (and some bumps)
But I let it run. Overnight, actually. When I checked back in the morning, things were looking… interesting. The messiness had started to resolve into something more coherent. It wasn’t perfect, far from it, but the cadence felt way better. Those little pauses, the slight waver in tone sometimes – it was starting to capture that ‘echo’ vibe I was after.
Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Ran into a weird issue where certain vowel sounds got stretched out unnaturally. Sounded like a robot trying to sing, badly. Took me a while, fiddling with some obscure settings related to phoneme duration, to get that mostly under control. Had to basically tell it, “Okay, be natural, but not that natural.” Lots of trial and error there.
The Result This Time
So, after all that tweaking and waiting, where did ‘silver haired echo trainer 2’ land? Well, it’s a definite improvement. Generating test phrases now gives a much more convincing result. It’s got that slightly slower pace, the occasional natural hesitation. It’s not quite like listening to grandpa telling a story yet, but it’s much closer than version one. The ‘silver haired’ quality feels more genuine, less like a cheap effect.
Still work to do, for sure. There’s a residual sort of digital layer I want to smooth out. And maybe feed it even more varied data. But for this round, I managed to get the core cadence and character much nearer to my goal. Feels like solid progress. Onwards to the next steps, eventually!
