NPC Voice Box
Psst. Over here! You didn't hear this from me, but the duke... he's a FROG. Want to know more?
Voice
Rhythm
Tune
Texture
Sources
I Gave My NPCs Voices Without Recording Anything
The system this toy rebuilds: a typewriter clock, vowels from a buzz and three bands, a cast from tube length, one sound per syllable, and a tune from punctuation. Watch it for how the trick works.
unitoftime/flow
The Go game library behind the channel. It has an audio package, but no mumble speech that I could see, so the code here is my own rebuild.
Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels
The vowel bands. Bell Labs measured the vowels of 76 speakers; their averages for adult men are where the six vowels here start. They have no "oh", so oh borrows their vowel in "hawed".
Software for a Cascade/Parallel Formant Synthesizer
The classic version of the buzz-through-resonators idea, with a buzz source and a bank of formant resonators. The voices here are a tiny cousin: three resonators side by side, Klatt's parallel layout.
Acoustic Loci and Transitional Cues for Consonants
Where the consonants come from. A b, d or g is heard in where the vowel's second band glides in from: about 720, 1800 and 3000 Hz. Each syllable here slides its bands in from the consonant's spot.
Acoustic Characteristics of English Fricatives
The hiss in s and sh. "sh" peaks around 2.5 to 3 kHz and "s" well above it, which is where the noise bands for the two sit.
Animalese
How Animal Crossing's villagers talk: every letter spelled out as a sound, faster or slower depending on the game, higher when a villager is happy and lower when sad or angry, with cranky villagers deeper and gravellier.
Bebebese
Animal Crossing's other voice, a typewriter-like patter with no vowels in it. Villagers use it for muttered or whispered lines, shown as faded text.
animalese.js
Someone else's take on the same itch: a JavaScript library that approximates villager speech in the browser, with a demo you can type into.
20 Years After The Release Of Banjo-Kazooie, We Speak To The Guys Who Made It
Why Banjo grunts. Programmer Chris Sutherland was Banjo's voice; the team went with edited noises over recorded speech because the game was racing to finish, and the "Guhuh" was Tim Stamper's idea.
ut-voice
An Undertale-style blip voice built from pure synthesis, no game audio. Its point that a beep needs a little random pitch to sound like a throat and not a telegraph applies to every voice in this toy.
Synchronize audio and video playback on the web
Why the lit letters wait for the sound: a browser can say how far behind the speakers run, and a page can use that to paint what you see at the moment you hear it.
Audio passed through WebAudio is delayed and glitchy on Safari
Safari on a Mac can play Web Audio close to a second late over Bluetooth headphones. The toy asks the browser which sample is actually playing rather than trusting the clock alone.