I work for a film studio that is working on some documentary films about persecuted minority people groups in the Middle East. We have done some interviews but need to disguise the voices so that they CAN NOT be reversed back to normal.
I know Audacity pretty well but is there any methods for doing this?
Once I figure out a good method Id like to post some samples in the forum as a challenge to see if anyone can reverse them back.
… there any methods for doing this?
Short answer, no.
For the same reason it’s a terrific job to transform people’s voices into each other (we can’t do that, either), it’s really rough to transform a voice into trash so that the trash is still understandable, but not trackable. As has been posted elsewhere, you have to change the rhythm, cadence and pitch mannerisms, not just bubble, gargle or muffle it, or anybody the least familiar with the person is going to pick it right out.
You still know your mum over the worst possible cellphone call, right? The cadence of the words is unmistakable.
Koz
The usual trick is to have the person’s words spoken by an actor.
spoken by an actor.
That’s if Hollywood is doing it, but you can get just anybody that can read to do it.
There’s a trick to that, too. With a little practice, you can speak the exact words someone is presenting into your headphones about a word or two late. After you get the swing of it, you can stop concentrating and your mind can go off and think about where you’re going to have dinner.
There’s at least one instance of an on-air presenter on complete automatic pranked by the background reader.
“Mickey Mouse, president of the United States, said in a news conference today…”
Koz
Are the interviews also written down? If so, you can feed them to some kind of text to speech software.
Gale