[games_access] RetroRemakes Programmers Q&A 2006: Audio Question

[AudioGames.net]

Hi,

I would say it depends on many factors. Honestly I don't think that, when it 
concerns clearity, a male or a female voice matters. For example: an unclear 
English native-speaker mature male slow-speaking voice might still be more 
clear than a clear English non-native-speaker teenager fast-babbling female 
voice. All depends on the sound spectrum of the whole game at one given 
moment during gameplay, clearity of speech, context of when the sound file 
is played, etc. etc..
So I would simply test a couple of voices during gameplay and take the best 
one.

On another note: my experience with the blind games community is that it 
(like the mainstream game community?) consists of more males than females. 
When taking this into account, a (hot) female voice might be more effective 
to attract and capture more gamers in your game than a boring Dr.Phil voice.

If you use more voices than 1, I suggest you use many different 
(contrasting) voices (male + female, old + young, etc.).

Greets,

Richard


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Giannis Georgalis" <jgeorgal at ics.forth.gr>
To: "IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List" <games_access at igda.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [games_access] RetroRemakes Programmers Q&A 2006: Audio 
Question


> Hello,
>
>> http://www.retroremakes.com/forum2/showthread.php?t=6572
>
>> I'm hoping to provide voice cues, especially for menu options, but maybe 
>> at other points if it's appropriate to the game. Is it preferable to have 
>> either a male or female voice, or doesn't it matter? My guess would be 
>> that a higher voice would have more clarity, but if there's a general 
>> concensus or some actual research, it would be good to know.
>>
>>
>> Richard, Giannis, Sander, anyone?
>
> I'm not aware of any research on the effect of the tone of the human voice 
> on clarity, but I saw that the festival TTS engine was mentioned and I 
> wanted to bring flite (festival-lite) to your attention:
>
> http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/
>
> which is much lighter than flite, although it has fewer capabilities and 
> voices.
>
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