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How can I recreate my grandfathers voice?

I have several tapes (yes actual cassette tapes) of my grandfather reading a novel.

Unfortunately a few of the tapes have degraded to the point that I cannot play them back.

I would love to recreate his voice, to “rerecord” the missing bits.

The recordings are in Danish.

Is this possible?

If it is, how can I go about it?

hperrin ,

The very first thing you should do is get them professionally digitized, that way the quality won’t degrade any further. Then you can try training a voice AI, but as long as you have the digitized version, you can always train whatever new AI is invented in the future.

corroded ,

I can’t speak to the AI voice generation part of this, but you might be interested in the Domesday Duplicator for digitizing your audio, especially if some or it is slightly degraded.

github.com/harrypm/DomesdayDuplicator

The project was originally designed for laserdisc, but it’s been expanded to support VHS and cassette tape. Traditionally, you would play your tape on a cassette player, then the built in analog circuitry would convert the magnetic signals into audio, amplify them, and feed them to a sound card on your PC, which then converts the analog signal to a digital audio stream.

With the Domesdsy Duplicator, you record the raw magnetic signal from the read head and directly digitize it into a bitstream that you can then process as needed. For DIY archiving from an analog source, it’s one of the best options for signal fidelity, and it will give you the truest representation of what’s actually on the tape.

DarkThoughts ,

Voice cloning is still kinda early, especially in the open source area. Whatever you may find now or later (it's a rapidly developing field), the first and most important step you should do is to digitalize the cassettes into actual audio files to prevent further degradation / loss. Make sure to back those files up too, preferably in the cloud I guess.

You should not need anything special to digitalize the tapes either. A simple cassette player with a 3.5mm audio output fed into your mic input on your computer and a recording software such as Tenacity should be enough (start recording on the program, then play the cassette).

Boozilla ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been able to generate very good results with this open source project. You need a pretty good nVidia GPU, and it takes some time and tedious work to get it working they way you want it to:

github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

Some voices sound exactly right. Other sound like a broken robot. The main reason I like it is that I can run it local without having to sign up for some stupid cloud service.

Deestan ,

While tools exist, like people already commented, remember that the result may not be what you expect.

A recreation whether by AI or a skilled voice actor will have slightly different intonations, emphasis, tempo variations, pauses and lack of pauses that are not your granfather’s. It is very likely to feel flat and wrong in an unpleasant way.

GetOffMyLan ,

There’s a lot of results for ai voice clone. I can’t personally speak to the effectiveness of them but it might be worth a look.

Successful_Try543 , (edited )

Maybe the term you are searching for is “AI voice cloning”. The engine of https://elevenlabs.io/voice-cloning claims to be able to understand and reproduce even Danish.

Edit: They seem to require some voice verification to make sure the voice is yours. Which is odd in your case.

https://speechify.com/da should allow to recreate the voice of “your beloved one”, at least they mention it on their German page.

boojumliussnark OP ,

I did sign up for ElevenLabs, unfortunately they cannot allow me to clone a dead persons voice, as per their FAQ:

You may only clone your own voice or a voice you have the rights to clone. For added security, when creating a Professional Voice Clone we require users to complete a Voice Captcha mechanism by reading a text prompt within a specific time to confirm your voice matches the training samples you upload for training. If there’s a match, your request is sent for fine-tuning. If not, you’ll have to reach out via our help center to have your voice verified manually.

Now I’m sure it wouldn’t be an issue to get the legal rights, but when I spoke to their support, they did not have any way to verify beyond the captcha.

tlou3please ,

Would it be worth reaching out to them on social media? Something like this would be great PR for them.

Successful_Try543 ,

Maybe https://speechify.com/da/ works. At least they mention the recreation of the voice of “your beloved one” on their German page.

Rhaedas ,

If you have the equipment (mainly an Nvidia GPU that has the ability) doing voice cloning locally is the way to go if you keep running into legal issues. Plus being on your computer you may be able to tweak and try different methods to get the best results for your needs. A year ago this would have been a maybe, but there's a lot out there to look at and try. See what others have done first in videos and such and follow their lead.

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