[Feedback] GLaDOS voice

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Grudge
307 Posts
Posted Oct 28, 2007
Replied 10 minutes later
Can someone explain this Formant business, maybe then i can achieve a good outcome.
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espen180
307 Posts
Posted Oct 28, 2007
Replied 55 minutes later
The first one to achieve a good result has to write a tutorial on it for the wiki.
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segfaultii
14 Posts
Posted Oct 28, 2007
Replied 17 minutes later
I have worked it out using the melodyne uno demo, sadly it chops up the audio and you can't save.
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espen180
307 Posts
Posted Oct 28, 2007
Replied 1 minutes later
Then "acquire" the full version and try again.
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segfaultii
14 Posts
Posted Oct 28, 2007
Replied 1 hour later
Sorry, you'll have to get melodyne yourself. I'll show you what to do:

First, open your sound sample. Here I used the words "welcome to the aperture science enrichment center".
img

Then use the pitch modulation tool. Hold your mouse button, its the second icon. Double click on the thin curve to flatten it.
img

Should look like this now:
img
(ignore that orange bar at the right side)

Now boost the formants by 150%. Do so by clicking with the formant tool on the horizontal bars and type 150 in the box at the top.
img

Finally, adjust the individual pitch of the words by moving them up and down with the pitch tool.
img

After that you are pretty much done.
Hope that helps!

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espen180
307 Posts
Posted Oct 30, 2007
Replied 1 day later
segfautii, can I send you the raw sounds and you edit them for me? I'll give you full credit for them.
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segfaultii
14 Posts
Posted Oct 30, 2007
Replied 44 minutes later
I don't have the full version, so sending me the raw files won't solve your problem.
The editing is so simple, if you have aquired the full version just look at the screen shots and listen to your track. It took less then 5 minutes to get the desired result in this example, and I used this software for the second time.

Link to the Demo on the right:

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?i ... ioL=1L=0

&&&&

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DiddyKong42
192 Posts
Posted Oct 30, 2007
Replied 2 minutes later

segfaultii wrote:
I don't have the full version, so sending me the raw files won't solve your problem.
The editing is so simple, if you have aquired the full version just look at the screen shots and listen to your track. It took less then 5 minutes to get the desired result in this example, and I used this software for the second time.

Link to the Demo on the right:
http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?i ... io&L=1&L=0

You could always get the full version Wink Wink

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segfaultii
14 Posts
Posted Oct 30, 2007
Replied 5 minutes later

DiddyKong42 wrote:
You could always get the full version Wink Wink

And pay 169 euros for custom sound in a map? Too much for me. I'll have to find someone else too who has experience in audio editing to make the sounds for me.

If someone here has "bought" it, please post your examples! I'd love to hear what you have come up with.

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msleeper
4,136 Posts
Admin
Posted Oct 30, 2007
Replied 2 minutes later
I'd be interested in some where I can acquire the full version of this program.
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espen180
307 Posts
Posted Oct 30, 2007
Replied 56 minutes later
It will forever be a mystery. :rolleyes:

Anyhoo, I DID "aqcuire" this program, but there was a fault with the "Aperture Science Pirated Software Registry Ownership Licence Entry Application", so I couldn't get it working. :sad:

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nickworks
34 Posts
Posted Oct 31, 2007
Replied 11 hours later
The problem with text-to-speech is that it lacks the necessary pitch to sound realistic.

When I listen to text-to-speech, I have a much harder time listening to what is being said. We can listen more passively if the speech has tone, pitch, and inflection.

Anyways, I seem to remember the commentary talking about mixing two samples: the actress's and some computer generated audio.

I'm guessing that they are describing what's called a Vocoder. If you listen to music and the singer's voice sounds way too smooth and digital (I think Cher has a song like this that was pretty popular... 5 years ago?), that's thanks to a Vocoder.

From what I understand, it uses one sample to control the pitch of another sample (and also mix the two signals, if you'd like). The way I would do it is have an actor deliver their lines monotone. Then create a signal that you control the pitch/note of. Use the signal to assign appropriate pitch to the dialog. The vocoder settings should let you decide the quality, wet/dry mix, and more.

All of this is easy to do in Fruity Loops.

Cheers,
Nick

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segfaultii
14 Posts
Posted Oct 31, 2007
Replied 1 hour later

nickworks wrote:
All of this is easy to do in Fruity Loops.

Well, post an example! I'm eager to hear the fruity loops edited voice.

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Player1
212 Posts
Posted Oct 31, 2007
Replied 12 hours later
That Melodyne tutorial posted above was really good. Here's an example of what I achieved using it: turret rant.

I used the demo version and simply used fraps to record the sound directly out of Melodyne as it played it back.

This took all of 5 minutes or so. I'm sure it can get much better if you massage the input to the voice synth and do some more pitch editing in Melodyne.

EDIT: Changed to MP3 instead of WAV to save the rainforest!

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segfaultii
14 Posts
Posted Oct 31, 2007
Replied 1 hour later
Nice, thats a good example.
To enhance the likeness to GLaDOS, slow the track down a bit and try some more variation in the pitch.

I found another TTL service that has a somewhat deeper female voice: http://cepstral.com/demos/ (use the callie voice)
Might be worth a try.

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Player1
212 Posts
Posted Oct 31, 2007
Replied 1 hour later
Wow this is fun. I've played around with it some more. There's no doubt that the AT&T reseach thing is the best one, and the most GlaDOS sounding one as well. Unfortunately their legal section explicitly lists game levels and non-profit use as no-go, so we probably can't use this for real :/

I did some more examples and experimented a bit with speed and manually editing pitch of selected words. I also added some reverb to simulate what the HL2 engine does to the samples in-game (although the specific effects used are very "signature" so the effect isn't quite the same:

glados1.mp3
glados2.mp3
glados3.mp3

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nickworks
34 Posts
Posted Nov 01, 2007
Replied 2 hours later

segfaultii wrote:
Well, post an example! I'm eager to hear the fruity loops edited voice.

Well there are dozens of ways to do this, depending on your goals. For instance, your AI character might have a completely different personality. I played around with my FX processor on my mixer and came up with some interesting results.

But about the Fruity Loops vocoder. I decided to try it out. Now, I'm not very good at it, so it doesn't sound perfect, but if you listen you can hear where I used a second signal to control the pitch of my voice. Obviously there's a lot of refining that could be done with the acting, the audio cleanup, and the actual settings of the vocoder (wet/dry mix, frequency, # of bands, the modulating signal) and the other filters I ran it through.

You can really clean up a sound of an audio file by passing it through a multiband compressor, or (depending on the game-play environment) a delay. I wouldn't use a phaser or flanger as I saw some people trying. Those do something completely different.

In the file: Unedited voice first, then the vocoded.

http://myaperturelabs.com/vocoded_npattison.mp3

It's okay, but a little too distorted.

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espen180
307 Posts
Posted Nov 03, 2007
Replied 2 days later
Yeah, I've tried every single program I could find, and it won't work because of three things:

1) The keygen doesn't work.

2) The demo doesn't allow saving.

3) The program costs $999.99

I just found a freeware program called Sound Indepth 1.1. I'm gonna try that.

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Rivid31
152 Posts
Posted Nov 03, 2007
Replied 1 hour later
I have "aquired" Melodyne as well, works fine for me. It seems a little buggy of a program though, maybe it's just my computer, but when you play any sound in it, it cuts in and out every now and then... :shrug:

But, I can at least save my wavs, and they sound normal when played in another program.

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espen180
307 Posts
Posted Nov 03, 2007
Replied 8 minutes later
Dude, what keygen did you use? The one I downloaded from demonoid couldn't create the license number.