Freesound Forums

So, how would I go about distorting voices enough to make them completely indiscernible?

I use audacity if that helps, and I'm no professional, so tone down the lingo please .

What kind of distortion did you have in mind? Old telephone, old microphone, digital distortion?

Could you tell more on how the result should sound like?
For instance, voices but not human? Not voices at all? Words indiscernible?

Shameless plug, showcasing what can be done to voices:
https://soundcloud.com/copyc4t/youniverse
Let alone the first sound you hear (a synth strings track) everything else is done with vocals by a single vocalist, even the bass-like track.

I didn't use Audacity for this, but the main tools I've used are in it: paulstretch and pitch change.
For guitar-like distortion, you might install some external VST effects, then you could recall them in Audacity.

I mean, so the voice becomes unrecogniseable as a voice, so the actual words are indistinguishable.

Within Audacity, your best bet may be the vocoder; try vocoding the voice with a completely different sound, not necessarily musical/harmonic.
Here's an example of what you can get:
http://freesound.org/people/hanstimm/sounds/16417/

A bit crusher effect might be ideal. If you crush a vocal sound enough, it will sound recognisably like a voice, but it’s unlikely to sound like anything generally intelligible to humans. I can’t remember if Audacity comes bundled with this kind of effect though.

time stretch can render the ordinary unrecognizable.

jamesabdulrahman wrote:
A bit crusher effect might be ideal. If you crush a vocal sound enough, it will sound recognisably like a voice, but it’s unlikely to sound like anything generally intelligible to humans. I can’t remember if Audacity comes bundled with this kind of effect though.