
However, when you set out to duplicate the effect for yourself, it quickly becomes clear why a police siren was chosen for the demonstration: it has a very simple harmonic signature, and cuts cleanly through the ambient noise. Such a clean effect would be impossible to achieve with a traditional wave editor, yet SpectraLayers Pro 2 does it in a few clicks. One of Sony’s product demos shows the technique being used to completely remove a wailing police siren from an audio recording, with no audible detriment to the rest of the sound frankly, it’s stunning. This is the real party-trick of SpectraLayers Pro 2. You can also invert its phase, causing your captured elements to be silenced in the original file when the two layers are played simultaneously, or use it as a noiseprint, to subtract its frequencies from the original file as a whole. Once you’ve got your desired audio data on a fresh layer, you can adjust and scale the time and frequency components, apply 32-bit VST effects, or simply send it to a more conventional audio editor for direct editing.

Cleverly, you can choose to base your selection on the second or third harmonic of a sound, rather than the fundamental, which is useful if your mix is muddy. The Extract Harmonics tool does much the same, but it also captures harmonics at appropriate multiples of the fundamental frequency, in order to convey the full timbre of a voice or musical instrument.
