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one small step for man quote

Overall rating (22 ratings)
freemaster2

January 31st, 2013

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Speech > Processed / Synthetic

The most famous phrase: "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind". I've extracted this audio segment from a video of the first steps on the moon, from http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html) and removed some of the machine noise from the original recording.

Freemaster

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giant
leap
man
mankind
one
small
step

Type

Wave (.wav)

Duration

0:08.869

File size

1.5 MB

Sample rate

44100.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Stereo

Comments
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freemaster2

13 years, 1 month ago

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here. Does the "a man" bit really matter that much? I've tweaked the link so works now (the ")" was messing up the link).

I just needed the clip for a video and thought I'd upload it for other users. My editor? It's just me, a student with Adobe Audition. I wasn't trying to edit anything really, just eliminate the annoying radio whine for a segment.

zimbot

13 years, 1 month ago

Ah, I figured it out. Your original description is providing the hyperlink with the closing parenthesis as part of the URL. Could be another bug in the freesound web code, or maybe you used an explicit <a> element and accidentally included the parenthesis.

zimbot

13 years, 1 month ago

:-) And no matter what you do, you just can't get him to articulate what he later said he thought he had said (and intended to say), which was "That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind". The "uh", if present, was too slurred (too quickly) into the "fur" (furruh) to hear. Frankly, the "for" is so short in duration that I think he just messed up, and didn't include the "a" at all.

BTW: I figured this would be discussed on the official site, and went to look for it (after writing the above). Your description's link is not currently working for me from this freesound page. I tried a quick google search to find the same info and came up with the exact same link: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html and from there, it worked for me, despite the fact that the link here is identical and still does not work for me -- I don't understand what could cause that. That is really strange.

Anyway, the commentary within it states the same conclusion:

    [At the time of the mission, the world heard Neil say "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind". As Andrew Chaikin details in A Man on the Moon, after the mission, Neil said that he had intended to say 'one small step for a man' and believed that he had done so. However, he also agreed that the 'a' didn't seem to be audible in the recordings. The important point is that the world had no problem understanding his meaning. However, over the decades, people interested in details of the mission - including your editor - have listened repeatedly to the recordings, without hearing any convincing evidence of the 'a'. In 2006, with a great deal of attendant media attention, journalist/ entrepreneur Peter Shann Ford claimed to have located the 'a' in the waveform of Neil's transmission. Subsequently, more rigorous analyses of the transmission were undertaken by people with professional experience with audio waveforms and, most importantly, audio spectrograms. None of these analyses support Ford's conclusion. The transcription used above honors Neil's intent.]

I guess there is no way to clean up the distortion on "kind" at the end.

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