Audio commercials. How to choose a voice? Male or Female? Who is the target audience? Which fits best? I decided to do both versions and use both within the same audio event – cover all the bases!
Audacity is getting to be more familiar and WOW – there is so much you can do with it that I haven’t even touched yet!
First – shout out to Ronald L – a ds106 4Lifer, who posted in the Google+ Community some work he had done using text to speech voices. This provided a change-up from having to do my voice over or try to find a willing candidate to read and record for me.
From the beginning;
- Determine product
- Write Script for ear hear
- Pre think possible genre for music and possible sound effects
- Go to http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/ and create voice overs. – This step required some time to space the text out for some emphasis etc. I also had to try EVERY voice and different speeds.
- Download text to speech files as mp3 for importing into Audacity
- Search for music background – TIME WARP – I have to get better at choosing and narrowing the scope!
- Search and download sound effects – more than needed, but better to have and cut than not enough.
- Work with music segment first and make length of desired commercial
- Import voices – both into same to keep timing the same for both commercials
- Split voices into segments
- Change speed of voices on certain phrases to smooth out computer generated sounds and to stress statements. (this didn’t work for all -still a little rough on some statements that I can’t seem to smooth) My script had pilates instead of Zumba – but pilates would not generate into anything close to understanding. Rocks glasses turned into on the rocks for the same reason.
- Go back and use envelope on music to raise sounds between phrases, soften background in certain phrases. The music track ended up looking like a wicked roller coaster ride!
- Add sound effects
- Use amplify, envelope and fades to place and emphasize.
- Save original
- Save copy as male voice – delete female tracks
- Save copy as female voice – delete male tracks
- Export each out as mp3.
One hiccup was in the male voice. Every time I exported as an mp3 I got no voiceover. I ended up importing into a new audacity file and then exporting again – this time all tracks came thru. It seems because the voices were mono and in the original they somehow became joined, when I deleted the female track it auto muted the male voice in export because it was the second track. Not sure if that makes sense – but 20 minutes of tense moments and trying different saves, save as, and exports, I finally came up with a complete mp3.
Still not sure how this all fits into an audio event – but I am building the pieces!
Love to hear any suggestions for improvements! thanks!
I think it’s really cool how you decided to do the commercial in both voices. I do agree with Erin, the woman’s voice is better. I think it flows better than the men’s but that’s probably just because of the text-to-speech. This is awesome, though. Great job!
Wow i like this commercial. I definitely think i could turn on tv and see it. I like the womens voice better by the way.