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Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

polygon.com

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Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#31

Post by klodolph »

zerocrates wrote: post #24
klodolph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say we don’t need real people to build 3D models. If we want 3D models, someone has to make them. That person might be a traditional modeler working in Blender, or a sculptor in ZBrush, or might be someone with a 3D scanner doing photogrammetry. The tools are changing, but it is still people using the tools. Just like how we invented an “automatic programming” system where the comp…

They're comparing making a bespoke 3D model of a character as opposed to scanning an actual person, saying similarly you could just create a voice from scratch rather than record a real one.

I thought that was obvious, so I guess my comment wasn’t clear.

A 3D scanner is an artist’s tool. By using a 3D scanner, you aren’t getting rid of artists, you are just changing how artists do their jobs. Vocal synthesizers and vocal transformers, similarly, aren’t making it possible to press a button and get reasonable sounding voice in your games if you don’t have a voice actor making it possible. If you aren’t convinced, then just look at soundtracks. You can press a button and your iMac will spit out the sounds of the BBC Symphony Orchestra violin section. In spite of this, getting a symphonic score is still expensive. It’s expensive enough that TV shows (with sizable budgets) often skip out on the symphonic score and do something cheaper. We haven’t gotten rid of musicians, it’s just that musicians are much more likely to have computers.

There is, in theory, nothing stopping you from buying like $200 in software and making a symphony orchestra right now. The problem is that you have no idea how to write a symphony orchestra. For the same reason, if you have an iPhone 12 or something similar then you can start using the LIDAR features and making a 3D model using photogrammetry in moments—except for the fact that you have no idea how to make a 3D model.

I think there’s a trap that people fall into, thinking that technology is just around the corner that will get rid of job X, Y, or Z. Often what you end up with is MORE people doing job X, Y, and Z, it’s just that they use computers to do it, and have a different skill set.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#32

Post by marcan_42 »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #30
marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

That is assuming they tried to write their own TTS instead of just taking an existing, working English TTS and speed it up and distort it. Why would they do that? To me it does sound exactly like that too in English. I'd wager it's more obvious in the Japanese version because Japanese is the exceptional language. There are only 44 syllables in Japanese (English has about 16,000) and one would probably still notice th…

Writing their own TTS sounds like what Nintendo would do, to be honest.

Spanish is about as phonetically consistent as Japanese. Most languages have simpler phonology than English. It's not about the number of possible syllables, it's about the rules to go from text to phonemes. The rules in English are immensely complicated and inconsistent. Meanwhile, I can accurately describe Spanish phonology, such that you'd be able to pronounce ~any Spanish word (English loanwords excluded) accurately including stress, in about one page. Written Japanese lacks pitch accent information, but otherwise works similarly.

(By the way, your stats are off; modern Japanese has about ~106 possible syllables (mora) by rough count).

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#33

Post by marcan_42 »

resu_nimda wrote: post #29
marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

It did work in English though. Maybe not as well, but I do remember noticing in the original Animal Crossing that there was some correlation between the sounds and the text. Even if it was just the timing and intonation, it could definitely be understood that the lines were actually being spoken in some form. I don't think it was TTS because it was too accurate in a really subtle way. Or maybe it was and they tweaked…

It's TTS. They absolutely don't go dubbing around every line for this, that'd be insane. That's the whole point of this system, to provide some fun sounding audio for the lines without having to actually dub them. You can tell because they speak your island name and your own name exactly the same way as the rest of the text, accurately. And because it's pretty monotone and consistent.

Besides, can you imagine voice actors dubbing this stuff in this kind of voice line by line? They'd go insane.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#34

Post by resu_nimda »

marcan_42 wrote: post #33
resu_nimda wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did work in English though. Maybe not as well, but I do remember noticing in the original Animal Crossing that there was some correlation between the sounds and the text. Even if it was just the timing and intonation, it could definitely be understood that the lines were actually being spoken in some form. I don't think it was TTS because it was too accurate in a really subtle way. Or maybe it was and they tweaked…

It's TTS. They absolutely don't go dubbing around every line for this, that'd be insane. That's the whole point of this system, to provide some fun sounding audio for the lines without having to actually dub them. You can tell because they speak your island name and your own name exactly the same way as the rest of the text, accurately. And because it's pretty monotone and consistent. Besides, can you imagine voice a…

Yeah that makes sense. I guess I figured they could have processed the spoken audio, not that the actors would have actually talked like that. I was just fooled by the fact that their TTS sounds more passably human than any other I've heard (in an abstract way).

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#35

Post by echelon »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

This technique predated Animal Crossing, though.

Banjo-Kazooie [1] was the first game on the N64 to use what Animal Crossing terms "Animalese/Bebebese" [2], and their intention was never to build a TTS engine. The first Banjo was released in 1998, while Dobutsu no Mori (Animal Crossing) for N64 didn't come out until 2001.

Nintendo was definitely talking with Rareware at the time and they exchanged ideas and techniques on game engine design, platformer mechanics, etc. Interviews from the Rare side admitted this (I'll need to dig up some sources to include here).

I'm curious if Nintendo picked up the Animal Crossing Bebebese voices directly from Banjo-Kazooie.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZE5A3DbHDk (Actually a video of the year 2000 sequel, Banjo-Tooie, but this is a better example of the same voice engine using various voices.)

[2] https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/Language#Bebebese

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#37

Post by johncoltrane »

Galanwe wrote: post #6

Interestingly, we have a word in French to call these gibberish languages that sound like real ones but have no meaning. It's called speaking "yogurt". It was originally used because young French people wanted to sing the English songs that they heard, but didn't know the language, so they would make up sounds that looked like English.

Interesting, I have never heard the expression "chanter en yaourt" used for anything other than fake English.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#38

Post by javchz »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

Undertale for some reason manage to do that effect well in English. I don't know how

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#39

Post by underwater »

Razengan wrote: post #13

Instead of the constant focus on graphics graphics graphics, why don’t companies improve other tech like speech synthesis for a while? That would bring about a new boom (pun) of creativity by allowing indie devs to write complex stories with spoken dialogue without having to worry about hiring actors and immutable recording sessions.

There are companies like replicastudios.com tackling this. I imagine it's not likely a games company can build a massively lead in what is a very academic field.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#40

Post by grey_earthling »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #14
proper_black wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact thing is called "washawasheo" or "washawashear" in (Mexican) Spanish. It would be cool to know what languages have this, as I'm pretty sure not all of them do (Russian doesn't, for example).

And a band made a hit song in Spanish about it in the early 2000s, Asereje: https://youtu.be/V0PisGe66mY

This song is loosely a cover of Rapper's Delight.
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