PMMJ (cheetahmaster) wrote,
PMMJ
cheetahmaster

The FAQ Question of the Day

4. How'd they do Soundwave's voice?

Thanks to Kendrick for this one; the quoted statements are his. :)

All of the voices on the show were altered to make them sound more robotic and less human. The process they used is called flanging, which means that a stereo recording was made of the voice actors, and then one channel of the sound was slightly delayed in a random fashion to produce, as Kendrick says, the "swooshing" sound in all their voices.

For Soundwave in particular, the voice recording was also sent through an analog synthesizer to remove "all the tonality but none of the enunciation or cacophonous sounds." The removed tones were then replaced artificially by someone on the voice processing team to produce the cool-sounding voice we all know and love.

There are various sound editing programs which feature "flanging" capabilities. If you're looking for this type of application, http://www.shareware.com is a good place to start.

When performing Soundwave, Frank Welker "simply uses his deep growling bad guy voice". The same voice can be heard as Dr. Klaw on "Inspector Gadget". Sometimes the editing team on the TF show would mess up, and bits of Welker's unaltered voice ended up in the cartoon. One of these times was in "Roll For It". When Ravage brings Chip and some vital info to Soundwave, he says "Excellent, Ravage" in a Dr. Klaw voice. This also occurred in "Webworld", when Soundwave reports that Ratbat has found something on a nearby asteroid. In addition, in "Fight or Flee" Soundwave ended up speaking with Shrapnel's characteristic repetition of his last word.

-from
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4. How'd they do Soundwave's voice?

Thanks to Kendrick for this one; the quoted statements are his. :)

All of the voices on the show were altered to make them sound more robotic and less human. The process they used is called flanging, which means that a stereo recording was made of the voice actors, and then one channel of the sound was slightly delayed in a random fashion to produce, as Kendrick says, the "swooshing" sound in all their voices.

For Soundwave in particular, the voice recording was also sent through an analog synthesizer to remove "all the tonality but none of the enunciation or cacophonous sounds." The removed tones were then replaced artificially by someone on the voice processing team to produce the cool-sounding voice we all know and love.

There are various sound editing programs which feature "flanging" capabilities. If you're looking for this type of application, http://www.shareware.com is a good place to start.

When performing Soundwave, Frank Welker "simply uses his deep growling bad guy voice". The same voice can be heard as Dr. Klaw on "Inspector Gadget". Sometimes the editing team on the TF show would mess up, and bits of Welker's unaltered voice ended up in the cartoon. One of these times was in "Roll For It". When Ravage brings Chip and some vital info to Soundwave, he says "Excellent, Ravage" in a Dr. Klaw voice. This also occurred in "Webworld", when Soundwave reports that Ratbat has found something on a nearby asteroid. In addition, in "Fight or Flee" Soundwave ended up speaking with Shrapnel's characteristic repetition of his last word.

-from <a href="http://"http://www.portents.com/marek/transformers/tf.v5.0-2.faq>Transformers FAQ v5.0, part 2</a>
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