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Hi I'm new to sound editing. I do have a question:
How do I make the voice of a Monster from my voice?

I am making a short film and one part has some Monsters talking. I would love to speak myself and the do *something* that it sound like a horned monster (no, my voice unfortunately does not sound like a monster already). For sound editing (mosty noise reducction and small pitch changes) I use Audacity, which I believe is quite good.

Any suggestions?

if you haven't googled, try audacity vocal filters/vocal plug ins, something to that nature. or you can record the line normal, then if someone here knows what to do, maybe send it to them and what not. last ditch attempt; huff the duster. seen a couple of peeps do this and it lowers the voice, ala satan from south park.

The Guitar
last ditch attempt; huff the duster.

The built-in effects in Audacity (avail. from the Effect menu) offer a wide variety of changes. Play with shifting the pitch down substantially, reversing the audio (if you want something incomprehensible), and the Wahwah effect -- that should get you started, but of course there's much more. Experiment and see what you come up with. Since the sound you want doesn't really exist (unless you're trying to copy a sound that somebody else created), it's hard to say that such-and-such will give you the right effect. It must sound right to your ear.

curzon
Hi I'm new to sound editing. I do have a question:
How do I make the voice of a Monster from my voice?

I am making a short film and one part has some Monsters talking. I would love to speak myself and the do *something* that it sound like a horned monster (no, my voice unfortunately does not sound like a monster already). For sound editing (mosty noise reducction and small pitch changes) I use Audacity, which I believe is quite good.

Any suggestions?

Hi,

Please send me some samples or a URL to download them, I could make them 'monsterlike' using Granular Synthesis and filtering-techniques. These techniques go far beyond Audacity's features. (no bad words about Audacity ! I am a fan of it..

hanstimm = Hans Timmermans
mailto: hans.timmermans@kmt.hku.nl

or use freesound to get in touch

Thanks to all for yout tips. I will play around a little and see what I get.

Thanks hanstimm, I have already sent you some samples.

You could try putting the vocals through a simple delay set to 1ms to 16ms or so with 100% feedback.

Dave.

Hi
if you send the files you want altered to djemboy2@betarecords.com i will gladly alter them, do you want cuddly monster or terrifying monster voices?

i can see where 'djemboy2' and 'hanstimm' to make curzon's life a little easier, but i'm trying to get into this kinda area, expand my currently little brain, so if you do make them monster like, would you be able to walk us through the steps you took?

Of course i could walk you all thru this technique, in fact i will post two tutorials tomorrow, one will be a booming devil voice and the other an Exorcist voice, stay tuned

OK
first voice will be like the voice from regan in the excorsist.
First find the sample you want to use, i was using soundforge 8 but this should work well for most sample editors, copy the sample 3 times, pick a sample and reverse it completely, then add some reverb, i used a cathedral setting to give it that cavernous feel(i guess i could have used a cavern setting, but the cathedral has religous connotations), now take the second sample and using a Time/Pitch shift, drop it down an octave, its important to use a time shifter as this keeps the tempo the same, now pick the reversed sample and select all, hopefully your editor will have a mix facility, use this to mix the reversed sample into the time shifted sample, have a listen and you should hear something thats getting close to what we want(hopefully), now take the unedited sample and again mix this into the time shifted/reversed sample, make sure that your levels are correct, the time shifted sample should be at a lower volume than the untouched sample, you might want to do some further editing with the overall sample such as levels, noise reduction etc, also for a more authentic feel you could use something hebrew, or arabic, basically the skys the limit, i hope this helped, i used a sample from the matrix so i cant really post the result on here due to copywrite, but if you want to hear it i would be glad to email you the finished sample.
Michael

one way to add spooky ambiences to voice is this:

1. reverse the sample
2. add some silence behind it
3. apply reverb
4. reverse again.

try different effects after reversing... anything that has some temporal effect is interesting.

obviously you could always feed the sample through CrazyIvan and Cyanide for additional madness

- bram

Cool, what does Crazy Ivan do?

Streety
i can see where 'djemboy2' and 'hanstimm' to make curzon's life a little easier, but i'm trying to get into this kinda area, expand my currently little brain, so if you do make them monster like, would you be able to walk us through the steps you took?

A processing sequence could be:
alter the sound using granular synthesis (change pitch, spectral content and time-intervals).
Feed the results to resonators / filters (with peaks and/or formants),
Feed the result into processes like Bram / admin explained (reversed reverb).

The results are far away from the original sounds, in most cases they will have 'monster'-aspects.

I am using these techniques quite often.
(for examples see/listen: http://homepage.mac.com/timmermanshans/Composition/music/WORDS_fragments/WORDS.html
sorry for the Dutch

This is a fun problem. I'm a big fan of sound altering devices and programs, convolution, granular synthesis, vocoders, pitch shifters etc. But there are some odd ball "natural" voice tricks that could work for you.
--I'm assuming that you are not a chain smoker--the voice actor that I worked with on the television series "Goosebumps" (a very talented guy, Cal Dodds) who did all of our monster voices was a chain smoker and this gave his voice a very distinct rip (due to agrivated nodes in his vocal tract). One session we had to do involved coming up with voices for demonic lawn-trolls. Cal would do his weird voice thing for the two lead trolls then myself and the post-production supervisor were to mimic what he had done for the rest of the gang. Cal finishes his session, the post-production supervisor never shows up and I'm left trying to figure out how to get my voice to copy Cal's. I didn't have the time to become a chain smoker so I did the next best thing. I screamed at the top of my lungs. It was a rather unmanly display, I admit, but afterwards (for the next hour) my voice sounded very raspy and ultra-butch. The raspy part is obvious but the lowering is due to the fact that this effect is similar to having a cold. Your vocal tract is "split" at the mid-point which means that your voice resonates an octave lower and higher than normal. So your voice can either growl in the low end or you can get a high falsetto tone. The advantage is of course the real time performance control. The disadvantages, well you are stressing your body for a few seconds to the level of abuse that a novice punk/metal band vocalist would experience after his/her first live gig so don't do what they do and take care of yourself for the rest of the day; drinking mild, warm liquids, etc.
--A more exotic technique and harder to master is "speaking in burps". This technique is used by persons who have lost their vocal cords (usually from cancer of the larynx). They swallow air and speak using the very back of their mouths (or the top of their throats depending on how you look at it) . It requires a lot of practice and if you're not careful it's easy to sound like the Cookie Monster. The best use of this technique was in Jean Luc Goodard's film Alphaville. It was shot in the early Sixties and Goddard wanted to have a special voice for the film's evil computer/villian. They didn't have easy access to electronic/synthetic methods so they found a man who was a former cancer patient and had him do the computer voice. The film is in French but even to a person who only speaks English (myself) the voice of the computer very sinister and effective. For demons this might work but it's harder to be expressive, the voice produced is very low in pitch and has a toad-like croaking quality.
--Speaking while breathing. Speaking while breathing in gives the voice a "backwards" quality. While breathing out you can manage a reptilian gasp. With pitch shifting this might work for demons.
---Have Fun.

smokesix
Cool, what does Crazy Ivan do?

The Russian is back.
Hide your children.
Fear his bonecrunching madness.

This plugins comes without a waranty. It will destroy your speakers, obliterate your sound and wreak general havoc.

MASS distortion and overdrive.
:twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

curzon
Hi I'm new to sound editing. I do have a question:
How do I make the voice of a Monster from my voice?
I am making a short film and one part has some Monsters talking. I would love to speak myself and the do *something* that it sound like a horned monster (no, my voice unfortunately does not sound like a monster already). For sound editing (mosty noise reducction and small pitch changes) I use Audacity, which I believe is quite good.
Any suggestions?

Can do it with audio recorder/ editor like FlexiMusic Wave Editor, using Effects command where in select Modulate option, the use of Modulate command is, by using various frequencies, can modulate your voice to create special sounds (synthetic, robot or animal voices etc).

If your sampling rate is good enough (min 44kHz), you can pitch shift it too. A neat effect is to dup your track and play the down-pitch shifted version at a lower volume. Since all you changed was the pitch and not the speed, you can get artificial harmonics. You might even pitch shift your primary voice recording up a bit and drop your lower mids in an EQ to add to the artificial sound. Usually pitch shifts of 1.5 to 2.5 whole steps (1.5 steps down is C to A#) is about all you can tolerate before it is unintelligible.

Use reverb carefully and on purpose; too much and the words are muddied together. Time shifting (delay) is a neat affect, but also with caution as anything greater that 200 ms will start to make the dialog very difficult to follow..

I'm going to have to go off and play with tone modulation as posted earlier and see what I can get.

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=22698

This might be a good example.

In my opinion it works good if you just record you voice and convolve it with an animal sound.

Example:

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=31304

cheers
-Erdie

zerolagtime
If your sampling rate is good enough (min 44kHz), you can pitch shift it too. A neat effect is to dup your track and play the down-pitch shifted version at a lower volume. Since all you changed was the pitch and not the speed, you can get artificial harmonics. You might even pitch shift your primary voice recording up a bit and drop your lower mids in an EQ to add to the artificial sound. Usually pitch shifts of 1.5 to 2.5 whole steps (1.5 steps down is C to A#) is about all you can tolerate before it is unintelligible.

Use reverb carefully and on purpose; too much and the words are muddied together..

I second this method, If you want that "narrator-in-all-big-bucks-trailers" feeling aswell, add a few fast gates after each other on different amplitude and speed (lfo based gates works wonders for this). Then compress plenty fold. I would keep the original voice unpitched, but EQ'ed so that it fits with the down pitched version. Make sure someone who has not heard the speech understands the altered voice!
As you will always know what it says, it's pretty easy to overdo it

- Beatbed