Oona Räisänen Censors the Censors with Bleep-Be-Gone, a Bleep Censor Muting Tool

Developer Oona Räisänen has built a Perl-based tool with which you can censor the censors — by automatically detecting the "beep" of a removed swearword in a video and replacing it with silence.

The "bleep censor" is an oft-deployed tool for live broadcasts, in which a staffer watches the transmission on a delay loop and hits a button every time someone utters a word considered unsuitable for broadcast to replace the audio with a piercing "BEEP." It's a relatively low-tech approach, but serviceable — though Räisänen's tool offers a solution to those who find the beeps more offensive than what they replace.

"Tired of those pesky bleeps? Bleep-be-gone is here to help," Räisänen explains. "This script uses ffmpeg and simple zero-crossing detection to remove the 'bleep censor' sounds from a video and replaces them with silence. Video is passed through untouched."

The concept behind the Perl script is simple: it processes the audio looking for periods of synthesized sound around a 1,000Hz frequency — and mutes the audio for the duration. "The frequency range is very permissive by default," Räisänen notes. "You may want to change that to prevent false positives." Other caveats include the chance for the beep-detector to get "confused" by DC shift "and maybe some beep-like sounds."

The script is available on Räisänen's GitHub repository under the permissive MIT license; those looking to use it will need to have ffmpeg installed and available in the system path.