I’m new to Audacity and I don’t know much about the effects.
I’m trying to create an announcer voice in the program and I was wondering if I could get some suggestions.
Here is the situation. I am holding an NCAA Basketball 09 Tournament on Saturday on the XBox 360. We are playing through the NCAA Tournament Bracket. During the pregame festivities I have planned for the Final Four Games I want to announce the players like they are basketball players during the starting line-up. I want to create that voice that you would hear during the pregame starting lineup announcements at a pro basketball game.
I wasn’t planning on a real time alteration. I was planning on recording the announcements and then adding effects to make it sound like an announcer. I would then play it back before the games.
There are many effects that you can apply, but something to consider is that actors and voice-over artists get paid a lot of money for the distinctive characteristics of their voice. No matter how much you try (or how much you spend on equipment) you will never make my voice sound like Frank Sinatra.
I know I have to add the emotion and emphasis but I just want to know what to do to get a sound as similar to this as possible using the effects in audacity…
<<<A female voice could be pitch shifted to sound like a male: (similarly to increase masculinity of a male).>>>
That hasn’t been our experience. Straight pitch shifting beyond one or two piano notes always produces strange effects rather than a male/female shift. To illustrate: the word “list.” The “li” part needs to be pitch shifted but the “st” part doesn’t. Sibilance is the same no matter who’s speaking. If you just shift the overall pitch, down, for example, the voice sounds like “he” has a rag in “his” mouth. Similarly, if you go up, the sibilance sounds shift so only dogs can hear them. In neither case does the result sound natural.
Those sound packages in my earlier post suggest ways of translating voices to get around that.
It sounds hokey, but practice in front of a microphone. Critically listen to the difference between your voice and the announcer, cut them together on the timeline saying the same words. Hollywood actors do this all the time when they’re called upon to “be” somebody else. That’s why an actor who doesn’t look or normally sound anything like the person in the script can freak audiences out on the screen.
I have a deep voice – almost bass – but I did a convincing woman’s part once by getting really close to the microphone and “performing” a woman’s seductive presentation. I didn’t change my pitch.
Lauren Bacall’s voice was deeper than Humphrey Bogart.
If you can do the presentation, then it’s just a matter of adding the room and maybe a bad sound system here and there.
No kidding. Cut you and the announcer together and listen to what they sound like. Most people have no idea what they sound like and it’s stunning the first time they appear on mic.
Then try to stamp out the errors. Most people talk in a flat monotone or nasal delivery. That’s deadly.
Go crazy. Move your mouth. A lot. You may also find that when you think you’re being a complete and total idiot you start sounding interesting and cool to listen to. When Johnny Olson was announcing for The Price Is Right, he used to vibrate and turn red at the microphone (although nobody but the audience could see him). He looked like he was going to have a coronary, but he did it for years. That’s the kind of crazy I’m talking about.
Koz, in your opinion, which of the applications that you mentioned, would be best for non-real-time voice morphing “ticks” like changing a guy’s recorded voice to sound like a female celebrity, or the other way around - changing a teenage girl’s voice to sound like, say, Orson Welles or James Earl Jones.
Also, does any of them support changing voice characteristics gradually and smoothly?
The packages were recommendations from others. I haven’t used any of them. Just getting them to work straight would be hard enough. Trying to fade in and out of the effect would be really pushing it.
While I doubt you could fade the effect in and out, you might be able to literally fade between two different tracks, one with the effect and one straight. Open the voice and apply the effect, and then Import the same voice which should show up as a second audio track under the first. Use the Envelope Tool (two white arrows and bent blue line) to fade phrase by phrase.