#9 - Nov. 19, 2013, 12:13 p.m.
Sylvari females have and always have had their own vocal (guttural) set.
Each of the sounds for guttural types used between the various races are recorded by different actors but with similar deliveries—hence there is some stylistic resemblance between sylvari female and human female within a given action. Especially so between human and sylvari because they also share sound cue timings since they’re animated so similarly. But each player type definitely has a unique set of sounds.
That’s what I thought too — about the different actors — therefore I always repored it as a sound bug. But after a while, I wanted to “check” it myself. That’s why I extracted the audio files. After a bit of “searching” I found the “guttural” sound sets. Being extracted in one “line-up”, it was easy to listen to all of them for all races. And please believe me Cody, as I reached the sylvari set, there were some files from the human set (again) (including the above-mentioned sounds).
Besides the sylvari do sound different than the humans. Higher in tone. I don’t now, if Jennifer Hale and April Stewart performed the vocal sets themselves, but they sure sound different.
If you say, Cody, that every actor performed a whole set, than some sylvari sounds are simply not in the game. Or let’s just say, I did not find them, where they had to be and they won’t activate.
Hm, it appears there is some overlap between human female and sylvari female, but it is asset-duplication/renaming and so its not a bug that is causing this, nor is it immediately apparent without digging up the raw, uncompressed sound files and listening to them side-by-side. Difference is, I don’t have to pull apart the .dat file to do it, and so I can be more accurate. Although I don’t have much time to devote to this, it’s worth looking into rather than let the discussion die.
So it is also very rare that this is the case for sylvari female. By far, most of the guttural sets are, in fact, quite unique for the character, and for all others for that matter. However, a little reuse is not entirely a bad thing either, and it was done for good reason—clearly there just aren’t unique assets for the sylvari female in some very rare cases. But it is quite uncommon, the cases where reuse occurs are on some emotes that the players cannot trigger on demand, some sounds which have been made obsolete and are not in use, and some small animations used in a skill here and there and are on longer cooldown, such as the first portion of Engineer Rifle #4, Jump Shot (but not the second portion, the descent/landing), and yes, just a couple of the death sounds in the pool are reused. But there is no reuse in jumping sounds at all between human and sylvari female.
For the cases where reuse happens on player skills or common animations, something can likely be done at some point to make the sylvari female (and other race/genders, if the same is true for them) more unique from the human female, in terms of animation timing and the guttural sets chosen for the skills so that they aren’t reused. If you can think of any other cases than the ones you mentioned that you think are particularly egregious, do reply to this thread.
Thanks for taking the time to post about it.
). The highest pitched Hmmm sounds like the Asuran male voice actor. The suspect one is one of the two deeper pitches.