Donald Duck decoded on Discovery Channel

Divex, which is headquartered in Aberdeen, used its HeliCom Helium Unscrambler technology to unscramble raw helium audio for the episode.

The Mighty Ships series follows various types of vessels on a journey, depicting how the ship and its crew operate. While filming onboard the Skandi Arctic for a forthcoming episode, the Discovery Channel made a number of raw helium audio recordings of diver speech, including those of divers in saturation chambers and while diving at depth.

With their breakthrough Helium Unscrambler technology, Divex unscrambled the raw helium audio files at their Westhill facility. This meant they were able to provide the Discovery Channel with clear audio files which can be used within the documentary.

Saturation divers use helium as the major component of the special breathing-gas mixture called heliox (a mixture of helium and oxygen). One of the disadvantages of helium is the Donald Duck effect on the voice, which complicates the communication process.

John LaRose, Mighty Ships series producer said, “We tried to modulate the pitch of the diver’s heliox induced voices in our sound studio with no success. When the audio files came back from Divex after being run through their HeliCom Unscrambler, all we could say was “how did they do that?”

Divex’s HeliCom achieves superior, crystal-clear diver helium voice communication through advanced DSP (digital signal processing) helium speech decoding techniques. The helium speech from the pressurised divers and the chamber occupants are mixed in an audio mixer before decoding to the selected gas and environmental settings by a digital signal processing circuit (DSP).

HeliCom is a step forward over existing implementations because of the incorporation of precise modelling of the translations introduced by the heliox mixture on the human voice including both pitch and envelope distortion.

The Skandi Arctic Mighty Ship’s episode is due to air on the Discovery Channel in Canada starting 23 February 2012 and on the Discovery Channel around the world shortly thereafter.