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The Sound of Silence
How to automatically remove silent parts from a video or an audio file
Simon and Garfunkle’s song, The Sound of Silence, is a prophetic message about the silent voice of an underrepresented multitude that still haunts us to this day. The pathos of the song rings far and wide especially after the COVID in the divided world we live in.
There is a controversy on what silence refers to in the song, but I have a more practical purpose for this article. There are many occasions when I needed to edit video and audio files mainly to cut out ‘unnecessary’ portions. Usually, they are those silent moments when there is no sound. I used to manually edit those parts by hand using movie editing tools. Luckily, you can do it easily with a few lines of Python code. Below is how you can edit video and audio files using the moviepy Python library.
1. Download a Sample
To illustrate, let’s download a sample video file that interestingly is about sign language.
