Dev Journal: Sound Mind (Patreon)

I have to say, out of the projects I've started, Project Voice has certainly been the strangest. And while Project Wild One was an immensely challenging experience to get going and I learned a great deal from it, PV (hm, that sounds odd) has challenged me in much more unusual ways.

Last month, a bit part of it was a question of content and direction. Usually this isn't a problem for me, but usually I start from the top-level idea I want to implement and work down from there, and this one ended up a little backwards, since my main goals were more on the technical side. I struggled a lot before I finally decided to discard my original ambitions for something a little more accessible.

Writing and design has gone much more smoothly since then, I'm happy to report. If anything, I suspect that the content I've written has become rather too extensive as it is now and to bring it to full completion, and I'm wondering if I need to start editing it down, to make the story more concise to fit its medium. But then, I'm also debating my earlier choice to try and narrate the entirety of the content, as I felt that just voice acting the one character might not be enough to really test things properly, but as the scale expands I'm starting to feel better about that option. That's a big question that's still on the table.

But there were still many challenges yet to come. I'd been buying equipment and practicing to get comfortable with the process ahead of time, but once I finally had my own scripts to work with, I was ready to really dive in in earnest and try to refine the sound to get it where I want it, and... I've learned a lot about just what that requires.

If you'll indulge me, it's been such a journey that I'll also use this space today to grumble a little bit about all the steps and troubles involved, as I feel like partly it would do me well just to make sure I've got them all straight in my head. That's one of the issues, in fact.

The obvious step was to make sure I had solid equipment to record with. I already had a pretty nice microphone and preamp to work with thanks to a sound nerd's recommendations the last time I'd been tempted to get into voice acting, but when it became clear that just recording at my computer desk wouldn't work very well, I needed new support equipment for recording in different spaces.

Every space you can record in has certain noises in it that you may not notice or even hear, but they can become very clear on a microphone. I experimented a lot, including literally stuffing myself in a closet, and was baffled with how much noise still permeated the walls in there. Finally I found a space that mostly works, as long as I suspend blankets around myself.

It feels silly, but good sound insulation all around is very important. Any recording device has a "noise floor" where if you just try to turn up the recording audio eventually you'll pick up noise from the devices themselves. Plus, when recording audio, you tend to make a lot of noises you're not very aware of otherwise. Odd little clicks of the tongue or the lips that you might not notice in someone talking to you can suddenly become very clear on a microphone. If you move it can be audible, if your stomach gurgles it can pick it up. There are steps you can take to avoid a lot of these noises, but it's important to give the mic a little distance and try to be loud, so your voice is the main thing the mic picks up.

But as soon as you're loud, your voice starts bouncing off all the surfaces around you, and if they're too hard or flat, you can "hear" that on the mic too. The goal is to have just the sound of your voice, with no background noise, no "room sound" or reverb, no body sounds or motion or anything, and loud enough that it's completely clear of the noise floor and nobody should be able to hear that little hiss while listening to the voice at a normal level. Even some of the best audio around, you can hear the hiss in the background if you turn it way up, and the way it kinda clicks on when the clip starts, then off when it ends. It's distracting as hell. I haven't even gotten into the editing process yet, but I'm sure that's going to be its own mucky mess making sure there's nothing distracting in the audio.

So. Once you've got a quiet space with enough noise absorption, with equipment good enough it has a low noise floor, with few enough pieces in the chain it doesn't accumulate more noise in the process, connected to machines that are lightweight enough they don't add their own noise in the process, with a shock mount to suspend your microphone free of any solid surface that might send vibrations through it, connected to a device that lets you put the microphone at just the right spot to speak with the right posture at the right distance, you're ready to start worrying about how good a voice actor you actually are. Oh, after you have a sip of fruit juice, because that does something to your saliva to reduce the lip smacks/clicking noises.

I've grown up being told I have a pretty nice voice-- that I should be on the radio or the like. Especially when I try to project, I can fill a space and it seems to have a pleasant effect. But... when I listened to my voice back, I have to say, I didn't like what I heard. You can hear me talking casually on any of my game streams, I do them every week, and when I listen to those I immensely dislike the sound of myself. My voice sounds better inside my own head, for starters, and something about the way I speak bothers me.

But the first step is to practice, and to get used to hearing yourself, so I kept plugging away at it, trying to refine my sound, to fine tune my voice into something I liked to hear. Get better with my enunciation. Don't rush through things or get embarrassed. I even found myself getting weird about my breathing-- I'd start sighing and gasping a lot between lines, it sounded like I was desperate for air. So I started drawing deep breaths to start and tried to avoid "extra breathing," but that sounded more tense and stilted, literally holding my breath. Had to learn to relax again, like I've never breathed and talked at the same time before. Find the right balance.

Meanwhile, I needed to learn to actually act. I know the intention behind the lines, sure, but when I'm so worried about my posture, my lip noises, my breathing, finding the right tone of voice, how to sound more pleasant to the ear and enunciate clearly and at the right pace... there's not a lot of room for fully immersing myself emotionally in what this character is going through right now so I can sincerely say their line for them. So... I need to learn to do all of that well enough that I just do it by instinct, without thinking about it at all, while I focus on something else.

And... I've kinda been getting there. It's been tough. Every time I start practicing I have to set everything up again too, and chase down whatever bizarre problems aren't getting me a clear sound. There's still a mysterious sort of wobbly radio sound that comes through sometimes and I literally haven't figured out why it's happening or how to get rid of it, just that if I stress out and fiddle with my equipment for ten minutes it usually stops.

But I've been getting takes I've been almost happy with, on some lines. I sound believable, and my voice is clear. Could be louder maybe, but it's a start. Close enough I can start really assessing it fully as a potential asset to use, to pick out other problems to work on. ...And that's when I noticed that there's something wrong with my teeth.

It's a thing for some people, apparently, that when you go to make an S sound, there's a shrill noise, a sort of whistling, at an extremely high pitch. The S sound technically is already a very high pitched sound, but this goes well beyond that, because something between your teeth, lips, and tongue creates an intense, distracting sound. I knew for the longest time when I listened to myself on streams or the like that there was something odd about my S sounds, and I almost wondered if I had a lisp or was otherwise "saying" S sounds wrong, but after being clueless about it my whole life, I finally found the problem.

And that's where I am right now. Struggling to find a new way to orient my jaw, lips, and tongue to easily make an S that sounds pleasant every time, that I can then practice so consistently that I form all my S sounds that way while recording without thinking about it. Because I don't have time to worry about my whistling S when I'm embroiled in confessing my troubled past or whatever, but it'd sure as hell distract you from the game's content if it were in there.

In short: in the last two months I've been working to transition all the way from know-nothing amateur to a voice actor that can produce content good enough to meet my own absurd standards, and it's turned out to be a much more complicated and difficult job than expected, as any of these "oh that's a thing I know how to do for fun, I should do that for a job" occupations tend to go. But yeah, that's pretty much to be expected.

If there's one thing going for me, it's that I don't need to turn myself into a full, proper voice actor. I don't need to learn to interpret someone else's intentions, and I don't need to be diverse enough to handle a lot of different kinds of content, nor skilled/experienced enough to communicate effectively with a director, and I don't have to go out there and self-promote and find jobs. I have one (or maybe two) jobs, and I can tailor the role to myself to make it as easy for me to accomplish as possible. I already know everything there is to know about the characters, and if a line feels off when I work on it, I can change it and make it work. So really, all of this is very much the easy version, with a whole lot of aspects set up ahead of time to be much easier than they would be for someone else.

I'm still not getting as much done as I'd like, as quickly as I'd like. A lot of these challenges have also been a challenge to my confidence in myself and have forced me to abandon my routines and comfort zones. I wish I could have gotten more done on other fronts while I was struggling with this, but I also feel like if I let myself get wrapped up in other things on the side, these issues wouldn't have gotten the focus and attention they needed for me to get past them. They have been the big challenges bottlenecking everything else, the part that would be the most involved and take the longest, so they needed focus, and they needed space in my schedule. I'm not happy with how long it's taken, but I do feel like I've made a great deal of progress, and I've learned a lot and improved myself as a person, and that means we're still hitting the goals for this project.

The actual programming side of Project Voice should be very light compared to the other things I've been working on. The main challenge there I'm expecting to face is just how to get the sound to actually play the way I want, since another aspect of this is just learning how to make sounds work well in Unity, as that's its own whole field of concepts to work with. As soon as I have an initial set of assets I think are worth including in the game, it'll be time to get digging in on that, but in the meantime I've started laying out the foundations for the game's code. I was figuring out a lot of the design along the way as I refined the idea of what exactly this game was going to be and what challenges it would present to you, and I think I finally have a pretty solid idea on most of that.

The graphical side will be very light, but I do have one pretty simplistic piece of art in mind I should get going soon, probably with Lessy. I'm still writing almost every day, trying not to rush it but to keep pushing steadily. I got on a pretty nice roll with it recently, though it also went some peculiar places that leave me worried the game isn't turning out as directly sexy as folks might like, in favor of more character building and such. I think folks might enjoy it anyway, but I'm still working to find that right balance.

I think that covers everything I've had going on. I told myself I'd be fiddling with PWO some on the side while working on this, but this project has proven much more involved than I expected, really. It remains to be seen if "work on PWO as a one-day break from PV stuff" is something I can really make work, but it's on the list to attempt, still, when it will feel less like breaking my momentum and more like a respite to clear my head.

I hope this didn't come off too much like complaining. It's been a lot to get through, and I have a hard time juggling so much at once, but it's a skill I've always wanted to learn, and I'm happy to finally have a good reason to really push myself to go through with it. I just hope the end result is something people will enjoy! Thanks for reading.