I’ve been doing some voice acting over the years now. Recently, I’ve being trying to achieve voices of a higher pitch by using pitch shift. Everything goes well, but as soon as I pitch up past 10.50 or so I get slightly distorted, chipmunk effect which sounds horrible. And it gets worse as raise the pitch higher. Is there any possible way to get the audio to play smoother at higher sound pitches? Similar to the way South Park’s pitch of the kids voices are smooth and not chipmunk like?
The short answer is no. Simple Pitch Shift moves everything up and you can’t do that when you move voices. For example, if male and female actors say the “SS” sound, you can’t tell who’s speaking if your eyes are closed, but the instant they start speaking words, it’s immediately obvious. So vocal pitch shifting has to leave certain sounds alone and only move selected sounds. Right away that’s a much more complex tool than simple Effect > Change Pitch.
Almost all forum postings that start “Make my voice sound like…” are pretty much doomed to fail, unless the poster is after distortion or science fiction effects. We can do pretty well with some of those.
If you want to mess with it, put your voice on two different tracks (Edit > Duplicate). Apply Effect > Change Pitch to only one track. Then apply Effect > Low Pass Filter to the shifted one and Effect > High Pass Filter to the unfiltered one and see how it sounds. I have no idea what numbers to use in the filtration tools or even if it’s going to do anything valuable.
I don’t think I’d put a lot of money on the cartoon characters being pitch-shifted. Bart Simpson is famously voiced by Nancy Cartwright who does it cold in front of a microphone.
That and pitch-shifting takes time. South Park barely makes it’s satellite uplink time as it is without additional post production. Nobody on the show ever mentioned it to me although I guess its possible.
No I haven’t equalized much. Anyways, I’m 15 and have sort of a low voice. Not really EXTREMELY low. Just regular for a teenage boy. Would this have any affect on it?
You’re also up against Human Cues. You can tell instantly when your mum is getting a cold because her voice may change the smallest amount – too small for instruments to find it, but it’s perfectly obvious to you.
People who try to move voices several piano notes or “make me into an announcer” almost always fall apart. Also see: make me into a little girl, make a man into a woman, etc. etc. It’s a common request. The best we can do is one or two piano notes and that’s with heavy filtering and processing. Not likely to make anybody happy.