Voice Settings

Mostly every character throughout the series uses Text-to-Speech (TTS) for their text boxes to bring out the atmosphere of an Atari/MS-DOS 80s game. Although it's publicly known that SAM, Software Automatic Mouth, was used for the speech, the issue is the setting. SAM has dynamic voice settings that can be difficult to pinpoint for a specific character. So, with much inspiration and credit to Tangy Mayonaise's Tutorial on Making Voices, this page should have all the necessary information to get your own custom-made dialogue.

## Website

We're going to use BetterSAM: Software Automatic Mouth by Imrane03 for this tutorial. There's plenty of websites and applications that perform the same function but this one is simple to understand. It looks like this:

## Settings

On the website, you'll see:

* A bar to type your words in.
* Slider for Pitch
* Slider for Speed
* Slider for Mouth
* Slider for Throat
* "Preview" Button.
* "Download" Button.

Currently, the sliders for all those settings are by Default when you first click on the website. Default settings are the same voice settings for John's speech. Moving the slider up or down will affect the numerical value, ranging from 0 to 255.

Once you type in whichever you want in the bar, click on the "Preview" button to hear what the machine will say. If it sounds good to you, click on the "Download" button to download the .wav file.

If you're wondering what the sliders do, here's an explanation of it (shoutout to Dawn of Fate's comment from the video listed earlier for this):

* Pitch: Gender, Age, Voice Corruption, and Voice Deepness will change, based on what the other slides are set at.
* Speed: Rate of Speech/Slightly affects Voice Pitch
	+ Closer to 0: Faster
	+ Closer to 255: Slower
* Mouth: Voice Gender
	+ Closer to 0: Male Voice
	+ Closer to 255: Female Voice
* Throat: Gender/Voice Corruption/Slightly affects Voice Deepness
	+ Closer To 0: Male/Deeper Voice
	+ Closer to 255: Female/Lighter Voice

It's important to note that the way the machine pronounces words don't replicate how it should sound to us. So, the best way to get around this is to reword your words differently to make it sound better. For example, using Default settings, "Forward" sounds like "For War". To make it sound like "Forward", type in "Forword".

Once you get what you want, click "Download". Although you can type long, intricate sentences in the bar, the loading time for "Preview" and "Download" are longer. Also, the file size will be larger as well so be careful of that. Generally, to save time, have the machine say a couple of words and then download it. Then, type in some more words and download it. It reduces file sizes and it's quicker.

## Chart

With all that said, follow this chart created by Tangy Mayonnaise for the assigned settings for the major characters. Please note that you can edit them to whatever your liking is and it's not 100% accurate. Click on it to view it better, this wiki reduces the quality size for some reason:

From top to down is the list of characters:

* John
* Father Garcia
* Father Allred
* Lisa
* Police Officer
* Amy (Possessed)
* Michael (Chapter I)
* Michael (Chapter II)
* Thrall
* Tiffany
* Amy (Normal)
* Gary
* Miriam's "HERE I AM" (High-Pitched, almost sounds like screaming)
* Miriam's "MY LITTLE ONE" (Low-Pitched, almost sounds like what she'd normally sound like)

## Trivia

* Amy's line "SHE IS MINE, PRIEST" has two distinct voices. One is her possessed voice and the other sounds like real, uncrushed female whispering the same line.

* The line "MORTIS" sounds very similar to John's voice. However, using the default settings on Better SAM doesn't sound the same. It might be a sound effect added or John's voice is lower pitched to sound like this.
	+ It's heavily implied that John's the one who says "MORTIS" since when he gets ran over by a truck as a Wretch in Chapter II the voice clip is heavily distorted and has nothing but a scribbled mess of blood instead of the usual game over screen. (Maybe it's a detailed look of his corpse as a Wretch?)

* Miriam's screaming and wailing when getting affected by the crucifix sounds like a mixture of her SAM voice and real audio.
	+ Airdorf previously stated when Chapter II was released in 2019 that he used real audio of an exorcism for Miriam's voice. It's unknown which specifically and what exorcism audio he's referring to.
* On some lines, spaces can be put into the sentence to make it sound more like what's in the game.
	+ On John's line, "I have to finish what I started.", if you put a space between the "fin" and "ish" it sounds more like finish. Otherwise, it sounds more like "Fine-ish."
* Michael has two distinct voices, albeit relatively similar.
	+ Chapter I sounds like his usual, possessed voice when appearing on the screen, such as "I GO UNWILLINGLY" and "AAAAAAAA".
	+ Chapter II sounds like a child, what his voice should really sound like before getting possessed, such as "Can I see Mommy and Daddy?"
		- However, they all don't sound exactly the same from the games. It's up to you to figure out how to edit the settings from a different website or application to replicate how his voice should really be.
* The Elevator Friend's voice doesn't use Text-to-Speech, rather it's real recording from another person. You can tell the difference because it speaks very clearly compared to other characters, such as "I'll see you in your dreams!" and "Follow me, Timmy!".
* Currently, some distinct voices for demons and characters are unknown:
	+ Alu
	+ Chalice Demon
	+ Peekaboo Demon
	+ Malphas
	+ Malphas Acolytes
	+ Cultists
	+ Cornfield Maze Demon
	+ Elevator Lady
	+ Spindly Lady
	+ Doomed Child
	+ Basement Demon
	+ (And others that I'm forgetting :( )
* Some demons, such as Alu and Malphas sound like they use sound effects for their wails and screaming rather than words or letters.
	+ But, the Peekaboo Demon's "YOU WHORE!" and the Chalice Demon's "IT'S TOO LATE FOR YOU, PRIEST." sound like they use sound modification on top of their low Text-to-Speech voice.

Generally, all of these characters and demons use sound effects that are hard to pinpoint. Mix and match and feel free to edit this page to include your findings, it'd be a big help!