I"m doing a documentary and the subject wants to keep his identity secret.  I need to mask his voice but the normal electronifying masks are too invasive - you miss out on the subtle humaninty in his voice.   We'll be listening primarily to his voice for over half an hour straight.   Is there a way of masking his voice in such a way that it makes it sound like some other human voice?

thanks:)

And Happy 4th:)

How about trying a pitch shift plug in?

I tried using pitch shift, but in order to effectively mask his voice, I would need to pitch him up to sound like a chipmunk or down to make him sound like a demon.  Neither one is human and both are distracting so we miss out on the subtle drama that's going on behind his voice.

Human voices are made up of a wide variety of frequencies and every human has different intensities of each of these frequencies.  If I shift the whole thing up or down, the ratio of these frequencies remains the same, it's just the same guy speaking low or speaking in a high voice - or it becomes cartoonishly extreme. 

What I need, is a plug in that would pitch shift some frequencies up a little, shift other frequencies down a little.  Rasie the volume of some frequencies.  Lower the volume of other frequencies.  And it needs to do all this for a few hundred frequencies.  But maybe a few dozen frequencies would do the job.  It then needs to blend the transitions between these discrete frequency clumps so there isn't an unnatural jump in volume of one frequency clump over another clump.

Or maybe this could be done with a variety of plug ins and filters?

Are you a member of the Avid Pro Audio Community Forums? found here

If not I would join and post your question in the Protools Post and Surround forum.

I'll give that a shot, but it seems most of the guys there are music guys.  So if anyone here has any ideas, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks

digitec vocalist has a voice mod feature pre set that can change the voice to man or woman  or evet ethel murman or barry white

Yeah, that's a fun box, but none of the effects turn a guy's voice into another guy's voice without going demon. (or at least that I could see) and changing the guy's voice into a female - though human- would still come accross as comedic.

But thanks for the suggestions. Any more I can try out?

Try iZotope Nectar.  It's a vocal suite that works as a stand alone or as an Audio Suite plug-in in MC.  It's my favorite audio plug-in--I use it all the time to sweeten voice-overs--but it has a lot of capability.  You can start with one of the distortion pre-sets and then back off the settings until you find something you like.   I believe they have a free trial period.

Search for "ring modulator".  There is at least one amongst the Nyquist plug-ins available for Audacity, and there may be one for Avid if you're lucky.  This will allow you to go from slight changes to a complete Dalek voice.  You'll find details here.

http://www.antarestech.com/downloads/video/AVOX_2_Demo_Video.mov

AVOX 2 - 10 day free trial. Throat and Mutator may be what you need.

http://www.antarestech.com/download/demoform.php

The ring modulator creates too much of a mechanical voice which gets in the way of hearing the speeker's emotional subtleties. Besides, the guy is going to be talkig for half an hour and that could wear on the viewer's ears.

I'm going to give the other ideas a shot.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear more ideas.  Some of your suggesstions may not work for this project but are great for other projects.

Thanks:)

Use another person for voiceover, like we would do for language translation. Start out with his voice changed (demon voice) and then bring down the volume and use another person's voice to give it more humanity.

If you find a way to do it, please post it.  I've always wanted a way to change my own voice for different commercials, running in the same market.

Thanks

Andy

So I've tried all the above listed suggestions now, except hiring an actor to portray my narrator, which I would prefer not to do because they might not get it spot on.

Anyone else have any ideas?

By th eway, i also played with Morphvox pro which is meant for masking your voice for internet gaiming.  It makes you sound like a girl or a teenager in theory.  It's a bit scratchy and of the fourty some odd preset voice alterations, only about three sound ok.  The rest sound like people with severe hormonal imbalances:) But if you want to sound like Feeb the Flying Monkey or Robotux, then it's good and it actually does a believable alteration from male to female and teen. But most of this is through a simple pitch shift.  The rest of the processing is done in a way that makes the voice scratchy.  And because it is mostly a pitch shift, it doesn't accomplish what I want - having a man be a different man.

But that hot girl you think you're hearing over the gaming console may actually be a dude:)

-Spencer