"The Voice Changer is a project dedicated to augment the immersion of voice acting in tabletop games using digital enhancement."
For this project, we deiceded to design an web application where the user records one’s voice as the input then changes the value of different features such as pitch to generate a modulated voice that imitates the voice of in-game character.
Many developers have come out with plenty of voice changer softwares. Our team has done some research of one of the softwares, MorphVOX. In this software, users can use the pre-set profiles to turn their voices into different characters. And this becomes the way that we are trying to approach while building our application.
So far, we’ve studied some of the features from Ableton Live, and how does the software work.
Team members & Work distribution:
- Aidan Hope (Programmer)
- Building a website for the application
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- Technical support
- Building a website for the application
- Matthew Reed (Sound Engineer)
- Research on how to modulate sounds
- Giving guidance of how sound engieering works
- Research on how to modulate sounds
- Hao Tian (UI/UX, Progress tracking)
- Interface layouts for the web application
- Trarcking the progress, upload to this website.
At the beginning of the project, we were playing around with Ableton Live and MorphVOX, to see how both apps modulate sounds using different varibles and features. We recorded our own voices and input different values of features such as pitch and timbre. This gave us a better idea of what purpose each feature serves in the software. We even sent an email to MorphVOX to seek technical support.
Then we tried to move this to our own platform. The first thing we needed to figure out is sound enginnering. Matthew wrote some documents on how to modulate certain sounds and the expectations.
Ghost Verb
Ghost Verb is an incredibly simple sound technique cliche used to make spooky ghost sounds. These are the traditional steps to achieve the famous ghost verb effect.
1. Pre-recordanaudioclip
2. Reversethecliptoplaybackwards
3. Addgenerousreverb
4. Freeze&Flattentheclipsothatitnolongerrunsthrougheffectsbutratherissaved as an effected audio clip. 5. Reversetheclipagain.
These steps will make it so that the reverb will play before the audio that you pre-recorded providing a spooky ambiance.
We presented our prototype idea and interface prototype later on, also a story board to show how to playtest this.
2 weeks later we had our first web application working, and also upgraded interface.
Finally, by the final week, we had our web application ready. It has two pre-set features that users can choose from: Radio Transmission and Ghost Voice along with the record, play, stop recording, and download functions.
In the Future…
In the future, we hope that the application can be polished with some built-in features and pre-sets, so that tabletop gamers are able to use this to enhance their sense of immersion.
Would you like to use the application? Follow these steps:
For Windows:
- Download node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/
- Download and extract my file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nH_CANPCgPHb1KpX2Czqh68MsozeNO46
- Open Command Prompt and cd into Thaumaturgy+
- Type in npm start
- DONE!