Making Kerbal Speech

[DuoDex]

So I'm screwing around with KerbCam, and thinking about making a cinematic.

I ran headfirst into a roadblock: Making Kerbal Speech. Now, I know that Squad does theirs with reversed Spanish, and I was thinking about doing mine in reversed French, as I am not fluent in Spanish. However, I can't figure out how to make the "radio" effect that makes the speech sound as if it is coming through an Apollo-style radio.

Any thoughts? Ideas?

[Master Tao]

Listening to

, I hear a few things you could do with an audio editor, though I'm relying on my ear since it's much faster than analyzing with the computer. If you want to take a detailed look at the audio, I recommend Praat, which is a free/open source audio analysis software geared towards language samples. It can be overwhelming if you're not used to the terminology.

It's a narrow band transimission, so you need to drop both low and high frequencies using high- and low-pass filters (/s/ sounds [high] and /r/ sounds [low] are both nearly clipped out). You'll also want skewed amplification because the remaining high frequencies are relatively louder than low frequencies. There's some fairly constant static noise that you might be able to recreate with white noise, possibly skewed towards high frequencies. I also here a lot of noise around plosives (sounds where there's a pressure buildup, like the English consonants in "two," "buy," or "okay"). That should happen naturally if you record with the microphone close to your mouth. I also hear some intermitten noise and silences.

Let me know how it turns out – I'd like to know what I'm missing.

Edit: Audacity is a free audio editor/recorder that can do all the above.

Edited August 1, 2014 by Master Tao
add Audacity

[DuoDex]

Listening to

, I hear a few things you could do with an audio editor, though I'm relying on my ear since it's much faster than analyzing with the computer. If you want to take a detailed look at the audio, I recommend Praat, which is a free/open source audio analysis software geared towards language samples. It can be overwhelming if you're not used to the terminology.

It's a narrow band transimission, so you need to drop both low and high frequencies using high- and low-pass filters (/s/ sounds [high] and /r/ sounds [low] are both nearly clipped out). You'll also want skewed amplification because the remaining high frequencies are relatively louder than low frequencies. There's some fairly constant static noise that you might be able to recreate with white noise, possibly skewed towards high frequencies. I also here a lot of noise around plosives (sounds where there's a pressure buildup, like the English consonants in "two," "buy," or "okay"). That should happen naturally if you record with the microphone close to your mouth. I also hear some intermitten noise and silences.

Let me know how it turns out – I'd like to know what I'm missing.

Edit: Audacity is a free audio editor/recorder that can do all the above.

Thanks a bunch. I ended up running the high and low-pass filters and then tossing in some white noise, some skewed amplification and some random beeps, then running a smoother over it all.

Sounded great!

[Javster]

Chatterer uses reverse english and russian, it sounds fine. Use french or english

[lajoswinkler]

Now, I know that Squad does theirs with reversed Spanish

I guess this myth just won't ever die. Kerbal speech is not reversed high pitch Spanish, at least not most of it. I've personally checked many Squad's videos. I've lowered the pitch and reversed the audio. It's garbled and unintelligible. Basically gibberish. That's why Chatterer sounds so different from Kerbals in those animations on YouTube.