GoldWave Inc.

How can I make a recording of a voice, (mine), sound like a radio message, i. e. snow in the background(noise), speech is somewhat garbled, etc.

If I was doing this.. I would use Multi-Quence.. and then apply the 'Flange' move down to 'presets' and then select 'Telephone'.. this will give you that 'tinny' radio sound you want (or if you use EQ..just drop out all the bass and most of the midrange.. and will give you the same effect.

For the 'snow' or crackel.. try crumpling a light plastic wrap (the stuff used
around cigaretts is about what you want.. other plastic /shrink wrap should do well)... or you could just find a white noise channel on your TV and record that.. and blend it behind the VO (voice over)..
hope this helps..
-voicer

In GoldWave use the Thin preset under the Equalizer filter effect. The Expression Evaluator tool has a "Add hiss to wave" noise preset to add a static sound.

Chris

Hi!

Well, this is my first post here and I hope you guys don't have anything against necro-posting in ancient threads. I couldn't find a better thread about my problem, which is, of course, the same problem the thread-starter had.

I need a voice effect for a scene in an amateur movie. It will basically be a close shot off two pilot-guys in a police helicopter, who have a quick scene overviewing a hunt for a suspect. One of them will be in radio contact and while you see them and the cockpit (from outside the helo), he will radio in a few observations (you know, "suspect on corner X street, Yth avenue, blahblah").

Problem is: I have no idea what to do here, so I figured I'd check the web and the forums and this thread comes closest to an answer.
However, I tried everything I read here and else where and nothing comes close to my idea of "the real thing".

Let me give you an example: I want something like this.

So, I tried a lot. I tried the equalizer and the mechanize effects with different settings. But whatever I do, it never comes even close to the example I gave. Most of the time either the voice is too "colorful" or it's simply unintelligeble gibberish - yes, even harder to understand than normal police-radio gibberish.

Can someone help?

On a real radio, the poor sound quality is due to four things:

-Limited frequency range
-Noise
-Distortion
-Compression

The distortion and compression are related, as they are caused by overloading the circuitry with too-strong of a signal. A bit of this overloading can actually increase inteligibility by drowning-out noise.

So, you might try some compression - Take-out the level variations, so that all parts of the speech are very loud. There isn't a preset for this. Maybe start with Boost Low Levels, and set the threshold at or near 0dB so that everything gets boosted except the loudest peaks. (You can reduce the overall volume when/if you get the sound you want.)

You might even want to force some clipping (which is an extreme form of distorted-compression). GoldWave tries to prevent clipping, so what you need to do is boost the volume level so that it exceeds 0dB. Then save the file. When you re-open the file it will be clipped to 0dB. For a starting-point, Maximize the file first, and then increase the level by +6dB. Make sure to save your original file with a different name, because once a file is clipped, you can't un-do it. (And, you will need to experiment with different amounts of clipping.)

Some helocopter sound-effect should add to the illusion too. And the sound-effect should probably be "clean"... added after the voice processing.