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

[Barrie Ellis]

Cheers Giannis, Cheers Richard - I shall post both your responses onto the 
forum.

I've always been quite partial to a Welsh or East European accent myself, 
but that's enough about me(!)

Barrie
OneSwitch




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "AudioGames.net" <richard at audiogames.net>
To: "IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List" <games_access at igda.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 4:41 PM
Subject: Re: [games_access] RetroRemakes Programmers Q&A 2006: Audio 
Question


> 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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