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Major props to whoever did the work on Camille's voice modifier

SpecterVonBaren·11/22/2016, 2:20:25 AM·8 votes·3,747 views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=68&v=38-fKvyD8sE

I just love how she has just enough of a synthesized voice for you to know that she's got a lot more replaced with metal than just her legs but that it's not like someone like Orianna who has a fully synthesized voice. Instead her voice gets just a little of a metallic tone and sometimes it goes away entirely so you can hear her unaltered voice. That's so well done and I love it!

4 Comments

RiotC3Sound11/22/2016, 5:33:33 AM16 votes

{quoted}

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=68&v=38-fKvyD8sE

I just love how she has just enough of a synthesized voice for you to know that she's got a lot more replaced with metal than just her legs but that it's not like someone like Orianna who has a fully synthesized voice. Instead her voice gets just a little of a metallic tone and sometimes it goes away entirely so you can hear her unaltered voice. That's so well done and I love it!

Hey SpecterVonBaren!!

Thanks so much :3 Really appreciate the kind words!

I had an idea to try and automate the robot processing in and out of the clean voice based on our talent's voice intensity. The higher the intensity in volume, the more the robotic elements would poke out. As she dropped back down into her normal range in the recordings, the processing would die away.

However, the story behind the processing is an interesting one. Ill go ahead and be completely forward with you and spill the beans. Even thought I knew what I wanted to try before I started, I landed on this voice processing not by 100% understanding exactly what I was doing...

Warning: I am totally about to geek out here, so if you are curious or an audio nerd... continue on...

To get a little technical, and if you're and audio person you'll probably follow a bit better, you utilize a dummy track of the VO that doesnt play into your main signal. This dummy track controls a compressor that pulls the volume down on your clean voice track based on how loud the dummy track gets. Every time the dummy track peaks over a set volume, the compressor kicks in and pulls the clean voice volume down. Then on your robot style processing, you use a gate plug-in that is controlled by when the previously mentioned compressor plug-in kicks in. When the gate opens, the robot voice comes through and blends with the clean voice over. Cue hours of tweaking settings and parameters until it blends realistically.

To execute all of this it can get a little complicated - especially when you combine how to make the robot voice (it actually caused a lot of really interesting technical secondary issues), but what's really neat about this technique is that you are not combining the two voices without at least subtracting from one. If you just had the robot voice kick in without turning the clean track down, you would have wildly loud voice over with the two played together, and quiet voice when it was just the clean. This technique automates this process for you and creates a fairly seamless blend of the two voices, and its done by utilizing the natural performance of the talent to do so. Sweeeet.

I have to keep some of you in suspense and keep the recipe for the "robot voice" a mystery, but the real meat to this technique is how to blend the two voices. ;P

The reason why it was an accident was because I literally had no clue on actually how to do this as I was attempting to do it haha. I literally just bumbled through things that I thought seemed reasonable to achieve the end result of this processing chain idea. Once it seemed to work, I walked myself backwards through the chain and tweaked out the stuff that didnt seem to be hitting the mark. I even forgot how I set it all up initially after coming back to it a couple days later, and had to get another sound designer here to walk through my own processing chain to make sure I hadnt lost the initial idea in a mass of routing spiderweb. It really is a testament to experimentation and pushing yourself outside of the box and comfort zone, you can come up with some pretty weird stuff!

Thanks a lot for props - hope you enjoyed the explanation of how it was made!!

Wraith Senna11/22/2016, 9:11:12 AM1 votes

damn, that's a lot of info. i had an audio geek friends at my old job, i bet he would appreciate this!