Socially Mundane

Have you ever peeked at someone’s profile and you see “voice-verified female”? I just can’t help but chuckle at this, my first thought being “why is it so important to you that you feel you must advertise this?”

I’m an old-fart, 100% all-american male who’s voice lay somewhere between a resonant baritone and bass… and I could put that “voice verified female” statement into my profile and be telling the truth.

Sort of, anyway.
Well, at least, convincing vocal gender-bending now exists in Second Life.

However, this post isn’t about that, though you’ll see why I bring it up a little later. Rather, I’m writing about the almost totally forgotten Second Life feature called “Voice-Morphing” and you know what? It is totally kick-ass.

A tutorial for playing with it (and then subscribing to it if you are so inclined) follows below. After I explain why you want this.

Very quick rehash: Linden Lab introduced “voice” (ability to speak with microphone to others in Second Life) a few years ago. There was some really loud, obnoxious, hysterical back-lash (secret gender-benders, anyone?). Linden Lab recognized immediately that there are many reasons people would refuse to use a voice feature in Second Life, not least of which: fantastical-themed role players. Think dragons, faerie, trolls, demons, etc. Hence, along with the announcement that voicing ability was coming, Linden Lab also mentioned that “voice morphing” will be added later-on.

That was a long time ago. Voice is here and so are voice-morphs.

Did you even know that?

When first announced, people dismissed the very idea of voice-morphing because after-all, we know that sound-morphing by computer sounds like sound-morphing by computer, right? The quality isn’t all that great and on top of that, Linden Lab expects us to actually pay for it! ZOMG! How dare they?!

So… the announcement that voice-morphs are now available came and went and no one thought anything more about it, if they even noticed it. Voice morphing became a completely forgotten feature of Second Life.

But here’s the thing: voice-morphing in Second Life really works.

Well, about two-thirds of the morphs work well, the other third is uninteresting to me (I speak only for myself, here. For example: “Arena” only adds an echo to your natural voice, nothing else). Many of these are actually a lot of fun and totally appropriate for many non-human role play characters (“creepy” is actually creepy-sounding). I don’t remember why I decided to investigate voice morphs… I think I spotted the “My Voice” option in the viewer menu and got curious.

Snarky tip for all you members of the Second Life Secret-Society-of-Secret-Gender-Benders: I, as an old-fart, very-very male-sounding man can quite easily convince you I am a “voice-authenticated female” through voice - one or two of the morphs are that good.

yes.
really.

But, I have no interest in doing that. The more interesting morphs though are the “Tiny” set and the “Scary” set (you subscribe to “sets” – a package of five morphs per set). For instance: that “Scary” set does a stunning job of allowing my Dragon and Griffon avatars to really sound… well, “dragon-ish” and “griffon-ish” in a totally believable way (at least, according to our Hollywood movie-trained ears).

Seriously: I wish I’d looked at Second Life Voice-Morphing sooner. It’s a lot of fun!

You should take a look – if for no other reason than to know what’s there. I’m willing to bet you’ll be willing to pay the negligible subscription fee, which is a paltry L$750 per month per set of five morphs (or a bonus “everything” package for L$2000 per month). Note: the subscription is per user-name account. In other words: one subscription does not cover all your alts.

You can play and experiment with voice-morphing for free… as long as you have Second Life Viewer 2.1 or newer – or a third-party viewer that supports it (I’m not so sure any do). The morphing process appears to be handled by the viewer, not the servers or grid or even Vivox. When you speak, it is your local computer doing the heavy-lifting, then the morphed voice is sent into the grid for others to hear.

So here are the questions I had and the answers I discovered:

• Even though SL Viewer 2.1 is required to morph my voice – how will I sound to other people on a third-party viewer that doesn’t support it?
  No worries. They still hear your morphed voice, no matter what viewer they are using. Remember: morphing occurs at your computer, then the sound is sent for others to hear.
• What about private calls (in IM window)?
  It still works: see above.
• How laggy is voice-morphing?
  Zero lag. Your local computer is doing the hard work. Any “lag” or “drop-off” or static or anything else heard by others is just the usual glitching that already happens in Second Life voice (unless you have a really crappy POS computer - which is not uncommon, unfortunately). Obviously less-laggy areas will give better voice performance than laggy areas – no matter if you are using morphs or not.
• Can I pay a voice-morph subscription vendor multiple times at once to stack-up three months worth so I don’t have to keep going back to Voice Island to re-subscribe?
  I don’t know. I suspect once you subscribe (at Voice Island – see below) – then it is an automatically recurring subscription – until your account does not have the funds to renew the subscription. I suspect. I won’t know until a month from now. At the very least, I have no doubt Linden Lab will notify you before your subscription expires so you have time to renew without interruption.

So… do I have you interested in at least investigating voice-morphs yet? Here is a step-by step tutorial. Remember: everything is free until you get to the actual subscribing part – so let’s jump in and have some fun!

VOICE MORPH SET-UP TUTORIAL

The first step is to ensure you have VOICE ability turned on (Enabled) in your preferences:

Note that in my case I have all media turned off. These don’t matter. The only preference requirement is that “Voice Chat” is turned ON (checkmark appears). That’s it. Nothing else is necessary or needs to be changed. When you click the OK (okay) button – a white dot should appear above your avatar after a few seconds – this can take up to a minute or more if you’re in a real laggy place. If it doesn’t appear after a minute or more – try logging-out and and logging-in again.

The next step is to go to “Voice Echo Canyon” [SLMAP] . Here, when you speak into your microphone, you will hear yourself (it’s a private voice test - no one else will hear you and you won’t hear anyone else). The main reason for coming here is to adjust your microphone (and be sure it’s working to begin with) for a clean, clear sound when you speak.

Now let’s get started playing with voice morphs!

Remember, we are using Linden Lab official Viewer 2.1 or newer, so some of these screenshots will be a little different if you are using a third-party viewer (and I don’t know if any third-party viewers even support this feature to begin with).

Go to the ME menu and choose “My Voice”:

Selecting this option will bring-up the Voice Morph preview widget. That is all this widget does: allow you to preview voice morphs (and show you which, if any you are already subscribed to):

This is where you can experiment and have a lot of fun! First, think-up something to say. Then, click the RECORD button and start speaking into your microphone. Keep your recording short (you’ll have to wait for it to finish one morph sample before starting the next sample during playback) – say 10-seconds worth is pretty good. But you could go on for a full minute if you really felt inclined to.

Speak in a normal, conversational tone and don’t try to change your voice or anything other than your usual self for best effect. Be natural.

Once you’ve completed your recording, simply click once on any of the morphs. You will now hear your recording played-back to you, in the style of that morph. Go through all of them and have fun!

It’s possible that like me, you will find a few of these morphs to be so much fun you absolutely must have it! To subscribe is actually really easy, but not all that intuitive. So, if you decide you want to subscribe to voice-morphing, here is what to do:

Look at the top of the voice-morph previews widget – on the right is a link called “Subscribe now”. When you click that, it will open your web browser (tip to Linden Lab: better to just include a TELEPORT link to Voice Island.) When your web browser opens, you will see this web page:

This is actually a rather useless web page. Except for the orange button that says “Teleport to Voice Island” – which is where you’ll want to go (or you can just click here to go there now [SLMAP]). You also can search places for “Voice Island” or map it directly.

Voice Island is a dinky little atoll with a few fancy-shmancy vendors. These vendors are what you pay to subscribe to voice-morphing:

Here you can see one large vendor and a couple smaller vendors. A voice-morph set (five morphs of a similar theme) cost L$750 per month. However, if you are the splurging type, you can go for the L$2000 per month all-you-can-eat option. That’s the large vendor: it will subscribe you to everything.

If you don’t want the pig-in-a-poke option, cam around to each vendor and look closely as each will display a list of the morphs included in that set (which I’ve highlighted in blue here):

It’s a good idea to keep the voice-morph preview widget open during your shopping exercise. That way, you can play-back your previous recording in each morph, matching what is listed on the vendor. This way you can be sure you are looking at the correct vendor that includes the correct morphs you want.

To subscribe, simply click on the vendor, then click the pay button. Done.

Well, almost. I found I had to logout then log back in for my subscription to “kick-in” (actually appear in my viewer and be usable). However, once I did that: woot!

You can choose which morph you want on the fly with only two clicks. By default, voice-morphing is turned off. To turn it on, simply choose one of your subscribed morphs. To do this, look to the bottom of your screen at the “Speak” button and note the tiny “down-arrow” on the right side – click that “down-arrow” to open the speech widget (indicated in yellow):

You will be presented with the familiar list of all people near you. However, near the top, just below your name is an almost unnoticeable pull-down menu (indicated in green) – click on that and you will see all the voice-morphs you are subscribed to.

Note: this screen shot shows the speech widget with the voice-morph menu in the “pulled down” position. You can see the five morphs I am subscribed to.

Simply pick one and all speech will instantly, from that moment onward, be morphed into your selected version. As you can see, here is where you can turn voice morphing completely off as well.

Now, go out unto the vast Second Life grid proper and have a lot of fun totally freaking people out!

Now, a message to Rod Humble (CEO of Linden Lab): I am a premium subscriber since early 2006. Why the hell I keep-on with it I really do not know - there is just no value or benefit in it. I can get land without it. The freebie Linden Home is cute, but I spend zero time there and the weekly stipend is just this side of moot. Give me VALUE and BENEFIT for the real cash I give you every year. Tell me I’m special and thank me for my business.

Suggestion: Give premium Second Life subscribers the full voice-morph package for free.

Why? Consider this: because you sell voice-morph subscriptions. Since non-premiums must buy a subscription, it adds VALUE to me as a premium member because I’m getting them all for free. I feel special because I am being “rewarded”. Also, it is something I can continuously use everywhere on the grid - that gives me genuine benefit. It is something that is FUN to use, so I’ll actually use it.. And finally: it will bring awareness of the feature - which is an incentive to bump-up to premium account or at least: subscribe to the feature.

I hope you at least consider the idea.