Removing audio hum using a highpass filter in FFmpeg

July 13, 2022

Today, I recorded Sound Action 194 - Rolling Dice as part of my year-long sound action project.

The idea has been to do as little processing as possible to the recordings. That is because I want to capture sounds and actions as naturally as possible. The recorded files will also serve as source material for both scientific and artistic explorations later. For that reason, I only trim the recordings non-destructively using FFmpeg.

Recording the dice example, however, I noticed an unfortunate low-frequency hum in the original recording.

I like the rest of the recording, so I thought it would be a pity to skip publishing this sound action only because of the hum. So I decided to break my rule of not processing the sound and apply a simple highpass filter to remove the noise.

Fortunately, FFmpeg, as always, comes to the rescue. It has myriad audio filters that can be combined in various ways. I only needed to add a highpass filter, which can be accomplished using this one-liner:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v copy -af highpass=400 output.mp4

Here I use the -c:v copy to copy the video stream directly. This avoids re-compressing the file and saves time. Then I use the -af highpass=400 function to add the highpass filter to the audio stream with a frequency of 400 Hz. This is relatively high but works well for this example.

Adding a filter means that the audio stream needs to be re-compressed. So it breaks with the original (conceptual and technical) idea. However, the result sounds more like how I experienced it. I didn’t notice the hum while recording, and this project is focused on foreground sounds, not the background. However, this example is relevant for my upcoming project, AMBIENT, in which I will focus on the background sound of various in-door environments.