Synthetic Voice Actor: Difference between revisions
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Writing a movie? Need a mechanical-sounding voice for your robot? Voice actors are so ''difficult''. What if there was something easier?
A '''Synthetic Voice Actor''' is a synthetic voice program that voices a character. It's not used a lot, especially when union rules would make that difficult. It's usually used for extremely robotic voices, or a [[Captain Ersatz]] of [[Stephen Hawking]]. It more commonly springs up in [[Abridged Series]] and [[Machinima]], partly to get extra voices, and partly because of [[Rule of Funny]]. When used against human actors, it tends to make the speaker seem inhuman — in more serious works, it's used for threatening robotic characters, usually. Compare the computer voice on the [[Star Trek|Enterprise]] (real person) to [[WALL-E|AUTO]] (not a real person).
This trope may not apply to [http://www.cepstral.com/ Cepstral voices], or to programs like Voicestitcher (thevoiceplanet.com is down indefinitely).
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* The Cylons in the 1978 original ''[[Battlestar Galactica Classic]]'' series spoke this way (human actors run through a synthesizer).
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': [[The BBC]] originally considered doing this for the Daleks, but with 1963 technology, they could have done only 45 seconds of dialogue this way, so they used a human voices filtered through a ring modulator.
** It's actually pretty easy to duplicate the Dalek voices. Record your voice with Dalek speech-patterns, over-amplify it to add clipping distortions(sometimes people, including the producers back in the day, often tend to forget this, oddly enough), then run the results through a ring modulator plugin using
** The BBC did the first Cyberman voices by actually building a mockup of the human vocal system, running a stream of air through it, and adjusting it to produce the sounds that made up the speech for the Cybermen. Later versions simply had an actor's voice run through a ring modulator with a different setting to what was used for the Daleks.
** The Daleks, also, do not have mechanical voices, only voices that ''sound'' mechanical. A truly mechanical voice would probably be one-note-just-like-this, but Daleks have a cadence to their voices, and they also go "EX-TER-MI-NATE! EX-TER-MI-''NAAAAATE!''" with each intonation rising in pitch and volume. They look like tin cans, but they have some powerful emotion inside them.
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