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Who should voice the USS Enterprises computers?

Weird one here, I know...on my shortwave, on one of my "conspiracy theory":) channels, there is this lady, Joyce Riley, "Power Hour" (GCN Network) who, I think, sounds very much like Majel Barret Roddenberry, especially if she were reading the lines as "a computer"....just a thought...(I wonder if she's a trekie?)
 
Law & Order fans will recognize this one:

Leslie Hendrix.

(She plays the medical examiner, Dr. Rodgers. And has a very Majel-like voice)
 
A company has now taken Roger Ebert's voice from commentary tracks and created a computer simulated voice. I imagine if they can do this with Ebert it should be possible to do the same with Majel Barrett.

Link
 
A company has now taken Roger Ebert's voice from commentary tracks and created a computer simulated voice.
AviTrek thanks for sending the TVSquad link to the video.
It really sounds too synthesized. Way too much like a text-to-speech generic program.
A GPS unit sounds better than this. But then a GPS unit has a somewhat limited vocabulary.
For Trek tens of thousands of words would have to be accessible by a sampler to put together sentences. Quite possible especially if all of Majel's narration was recorded on DAT (Digital Audio Tape) with not analog tape hiss.
 
I still don't think it's a good idea. Majel had a wonderful voice, but in a strictly practical sense, a computer can be voiced by anyone.

Roger Ebert's synthesized voice is used where *his* specific voice is needed. Not the same thing at all.
 
Brad Garrett...

Accept no substitute...

i wouldn't mind hearing a male computer voice. Dunno who i would pick though. Actually yeah i do, Frank Welker doing 1980's soundwave 'as you command mega.. i mean captain kirk'.

Frank Welker could work...

He does Scooby-Doo...
Bronx (from Gargoyles)...
Curious George...
Money Ninjas (from Kim Possible)...
K-9 (from Duck Dodgers)...
Faffy (from Dave The Barbarian)...
Cri-Kee (from Mulan)...
Monkey (from Dexter's Laboratory)...
Santa's Little Helper (from The Simpsons)...
Ace The Bathound (from Batman Beyond)...
Abu (from Aladdin)...
Shag (from Road Rovers)...
Suchi (from Captain Planet And The Planeteers)...
Isis The Cat (from Batman The Animated Series)...
Bigfoot (from A Goofy Movie)...
Chainsaw The Dog (from Goof Troop)...
Furrball (from Tiny Toon Adventures)...
Max The Sheepdog (from The Little Mermaid)...
Toby The Dog (from The Great Mouse Detective)...
Felicia The Cat (from The Great Mouse Detective)...
Royal Guard Dogs (from The Great Mouse Detective)...
Uni (from Dungeons And Dragons)...
Brain (from Inspector Gadget)...
Wonder Dog (from Super Friends)...
Dino (from recent Flintstones cartoons)...
Bandit (from recent Jonny Quest cartoons)...

:devil: :devil: :devil:

Is it me or does he voice a lot of animals that don't really talk? Yeesh! Although I still think the Trek Reboot's computer voice should be female - doesn't have to be a Majel voice. Although Gates would be pretty cool though. Was watching TNG on SyFy last night and they aired that really Bev centric episode and wasn't particularily paying a whole lot of attention but her voice could be neat to hear in either nuTrek or later Trek. Although for any Post-TNG stuff I wouldn't mind Brent Spiner doing the computer voice. We've had Majel's voice as the computer for a very long time.
 
I wonder if there are enough recording samples of Majel Barret as the computer that they could use a computer to sample her voice.
True. I've downloaded off the web WAV files of her saying dozens of things, and they could build a lot of new comments just by splicing words together. Sure, her inflection would be off occasionally, but this is a computer we're taking about: is should sound like an imperfect imitation of human speech. ;)
A few years ago, I read about a country singer singing a duet with a male singer (Conway Twitty?) who had been dead for over a decade. They sampled his voice from songs he had recorded, then used software (autotune, maybe?) to change the tone and inflection to fit the new song. And engineer who had worked with the dead singer said it wound up sounding like him singing a song he hadn't read before, like he was singing off the sheet music and didn't really know the story so he wasn't putting a lot of emotion into it. This would be maybe a decade ago, so the process is probably better and/or cheaper now.
mickmike mentioned:
i wouldn't mind hearing a male computer voice.
I would. It has been researched that the sound of a female voice is better remembered than a man's voice for informational purposes. I don't have a reference but I heard it maybe 10 years ago or read it somewhere then. So set your car's GPS unit to a female voice...
I had heard something similar: that women have been favored as police dispatchers since at least the 1960's due to studies that said that all people, and men especially, find a voice in the range of the typical female voice easier to hear clearly, easier to hear over background noise, easier to understand when distorted, and that it suffers less distortion when transmitted by radio and when reproduced by inexpensive speakers.
So, some of it is social or psychological or maybe even physiological, but some of it is just physics. :)
 
I wonder if there are enough recording samples of Majel Barret as the computer that they could use a computer to sample her voice.

Were I producer at Trek I would have done this years ago: get a sampling of all of her phonetic performances and make a matrix of her voice suitable for any statements.

We know this is possible; the Simpsons actors were almost thrown out of work years ago because FOX said they didn't need them anymore.

(sorry, someone in the last 4 pages probably already said this, but I didn't have the patience to sift through all of it.)
 
Frank Welker could work...

He does Scooby-Doo...


Wrong right off the bat... Frank Welker does the voice of Freddy Jones on Scooby Doo. You also missed two of his more noticeable roles, Megatron and Soundwave on the Transformers. (That's right! Freddy Jones = Megatron!)

Scooby Doo was voiced by Don Messick, who also did the voice of Papa Smurf, among many, many, others.

I know my voice actors.






Sigourney Weaver would be a great choice, especially considering her role on Galaxy Quest. But my #1 vote goes to (Sorry Nichelle) Kathleen Turner!
 
Frank Welker could work...

He does Scooby-Doo...


Wrong right off the bat... Frank Welker does the voice of Freddy Jones on Scooby Doo. You also missed two of his more noticeable roles, Megatron and Soundwave on the Transformers. (That's right! Freddy Jones = Megatron!)

Scooby Doo was voiced by Don Messick, who also did the voice of Papa Smurf, among many, many, others.

I know my voice actors.






Sigourney Weaver would be a great choice, especially considering her role on Galaxy Quest. But my #1 vote goes to (Sorry Nichelle) Kathleen Turner!

That's true, but Frank Welker has been doing the voice of Scooby-Doo since Don Messick passed away in 1997...

And that post was meant to be sarcastic and/or amusing, so I deliberately skipped over Frank Welker's non-animal roles...
 
About the Ebert voice thing, the same company also did one for George Bush. There's a website somewhere where you can type in a phrase and make George W. Bush say whatever you want. It wasn't that bad.

Considering the Enterprise computer will be saying much of the same thing as always, I bet the technology would turn out better than either Ebert or George. It is expensive though.
 
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