Team Project Portfolio: Voice

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Editing and Augmenting Dialogue

The goal of editing the dialogue was to take it from standard human speech and to give it an augmented robotic flair. 

Initial Attempts

Initially, the clips were altered using Reaper alone and a Vocoder plugin. This wasn’t producing the required effect however. Changes in the voice were a little too sudden and the audio too discordant. The voice was unsettling but for the wrong reasons, it was more irritating than unnerving.

At this stage the primary parameters of the speech that were being altered were things like the playback speed, pitch and the addition of reverb.

Plugin Selection

Primarily two plugins were used to alter the voices, Valhalla Frequency Echo and Ambience, with a third Fracture being used occasionally. Valhalla Frequency Echo allowed me to add a delay effect, with the voice repeating milliseconds to seconds after the initial speech, and shifting the frequency would alter the pitch of this second voice producing an electronic sounding overtone to the voice. 

Effect Parameter Changing Mid Clip

However, a steady group of unchanging effects still allowed the recordings to sound too stable and not unnerving or glitch-like, so the next step was to modify the parameters of the effects during the speech itself. Initially these differently effected segments were put on different tracks in Reaper, with the effects at different parameters but this was both inefficient and did not produce the results desired. There were definitive parts of the line where you could tell the effects had changed suddenly, the way to counter this was the use of Automation in reaper.

Automation in Reaper

Automation was used to change the different parameters over time more gradually instead of the sharp adjustments that were being made. Automation allows the user to adjust the envelopes of each individual effect parameter such as the delay or frequency shift found in Valhalla Frequency Echo.

Below you can see on the Track CalmCut, it has several tracks below it showing the envelopes of certain parameters of the effects used on it. Even in instances where we do want the effect to appear quite suddenly, the use of automation allows us to give it that little moment to develop and ramp up so it doesn't sound stilted.

Example of use of Automation/Editing Effect Envelopes in Reaper

Below you can find some of the finished voice lines that were created using the final technique,

After getting some feedback, we decided to look for a new TRISH voice actor. Our plan was to look further and then after we had selected some that may fit the role, to ask users which performance best suited the game. Unfortunately, our selection process was altered due to COVID-19. 

Changes from a sound design process were relatively minor although the intensity of the effect on TRISH's voice was a little more impactful. Below you can find a compilation of the final TRISH's lines.