- Mon Jun 21, 2004 10:00 am
#5026
I think this voice converter is a great idea. Not simply as an electronic toy, but more sophisticated versions would do a variety of other things. Here are a couple of suggestions.
Record a few episodes of some of the most famous radio comedy shows and serials from the past eg The Goon Show or whatever are your favourites, then write new episodes and have actors read the scripts and a voice converter would reproduce the voices of the original actors.
By attaching voice converters to audio systems, politicians, sermon-givers, radio and television announcers etc could deliver their speeches, sermons, news editorials or whatever in the voices of famous orators such as John F. Kennedy or Winston Churchill.
Or what if we wrote some new songs for Elvis, found some singers who could impersonate the general style of Elvis, and then used a voice converter to produce a new smash hit double album of Elvis in the twenty first century. Elvis lives!
Now this is where Sarah might jump in with “See I told you so, here’s this MissPlayful already planning to use the voice converter to impersonate actors, announcers, orators and singers, doubtless infringing numerous copyrights and patents in the process, and before long she will be forging new Elvis songs and then claiming they are previously undiscovered songs found in a studio basement, and selling them for millions to an unsuspecting public!”
Well, I do agree with your comment Sarah - like numerous other human inventions eg the internet, aeroplanes, credit cards, matches, you name it, the voice converter will be used for negative as well as positive purposes, and maybe there will need to be some laws passed as you suggest. (Does anyone hold copyright on the voices of people who are no longer with us I wonder?). But I would be willing to bet that voice converters in one form or another will be built - whether as separate black boxes or as complex computer programs, and they will take their place in the ever-growing plethora of electronic devices being used and misused by humanity in the twenty-first century.