Audacity novice here. I’m creating a Halloween scene with a dozen of my various monsters…Dracula, Medusa, Demented Prisoner, Pirate etc etc. Mostly ‘male’ voices. All are outside.
The scene is that they are all posing for a class reunion photo. Instead of saying ‘Cheese’, I want to create sound effect of them saying ‘Ectoplasm’. This doesn’t have to be ultra realistic. Just need a dozen different voices, of the mostly evil/horror persuasion (but nothing too deep/demonic/spooky), all somewhat loudly saying ‘Ectoplasm’.
Can somebody create for me, or guide me in the process, of doing this?
I was initially thinking of taking a one word recording and apply various modifications to it. But just occurred to me…perhaps I’m just better off recording myself saying the word a dozen different ways and layering them on top of each other. Is that the way to go? If yes, then I should be able to manage. Don’t think I need any special effects for any of that?
Good job planning in advance! And it sounds like a “cute” idea!
Yes, I’d say it should be 90% “voice acting”. If you can get more people-voices to help, that would be good.
You can try the Change Pitch effect, or you can speed-up or slow-down. The Change Speed effect changes speed and pitch together. To make the Change Speed effect work, you’ll need to temporarily speed-up or slow-down the “backing track” so everything stays in-synch when you change the speed effect on the new voice (1)
There are also various distortion effects built-into Audaicty.
Or, on the Internet you should be able to find some voice-changing effects. Usually they sound unnatural, but in this case that’s what you want.
Note that mixing is done by summation so with 10 voices you’ll have to lower the volume of each by about 10% to prevent clipping (distortion). Unfortunately, Audacity’s mixer doesn’t have a master volume control…
Some distortion might be good, but probably on the individual voices, and you want to be able to control it.
Or another (better) solution is to (temporarily) export-as 32-bit floating-point WAV. Floating point has (almost) no upper (or lower) limit so it won’t clip. (But it can clip your DAC during playback.) Re-open the WAV file and run the Amplify or Normalize effect to bring down the volume, and then export again to your desired format.
(1) If you are familiar with The Chipmunks (from the 1950’s & 60’s) they didn’t have digital processing so they would slow-down the backing track and sing-along with a normal voice. Everything is mixed and when played back at the correct speed, you hear the chipmunk voice effect at the correct pitch in-tune and in- tempo with the backing track and the “human” voices back to normal.
You’ll probably want to mostly do the opposite to lower the pitch… But you may want one or more higher-pitch “screeching” voices (?).