Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Voice modification with Audacity

If you have a low budget, then you most likely cant afford many voice actors. One way of going by this is by modifying your own voice in a free open source program called Audacity. With just a few modifications of pitch and speed, and changing the way you speak, you can get a wide variety of voices for your games. Although, while you can get a good recording (after a clean-up) with a built in mic to a computer that was murdered by a stray bowl of milk, and then resurrected by ancient voodoo magick, (yes, my laptop is a zombie laptop), you will get a much better recording with a proper mic. Audacity is a good program to use for the clean-up, as all I do right now to get a good voice recording is just use its remove noise filter. After that, I just deepen the voice (speed -10, pitch -6, my voice sounds a bit young to me.) to get Ethan's voice.

If your a guy, then just raising the pitch to get the female voice will not do. There is more of a difference than pitch in that. While this wouldn't work for a high quality female character voice, you can get a female sounding voice with a program called MorphVOX, passed through a few filters to make it sound like a phone call and amplified down was... acceptable to my OCD ears. For best results, get a girl that can act.

Audacity can also be used to modify any sounds that you want. If you have a gunshot and need an explosion, use the tempo filter to make it longer, and possibly use bass boost and high pass filters to get that rumble. Speaking of explosion, a tutorial on using the white noise generator to make an explosion sound can be found here.

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