Prompted by a short debate I had with a unit. An issue that most commonly pops up about Union vocoders is:
"You can't hear an accent through a vocoder." However, as I am about to demonstrate, this is not the case, or cannot be assumed.
The PurposeThe aim of vocoders is to mask someone's voice so that they will not be individually identifiable if they removed the vocoder. Hence, due to the job Civil Protection uphold, they require a vocoder for the following reasons.
- To appear more intimidating. - A masked individual with a deep-sounding voice sounds very threatening and therefore helps Civil Protection maintain order through fear.
- To further help mask their identity. - It is possible for Civil Protection units to take off their uniform and go off duty. Due to the violent nature of their work, if a third party can identify them whilst they are off-duty, this could endanger the unit.
What It DoesBasically it's a device fitted into the frontal part of the mask that applies certain filters on to the user's voice as they speak into it. More specifically it:
- Reduces pitch
- Uses a formant filter
- Adds various filters that further garbles the voice
Accents are
not defined by the warping of these things. It is the fashion in which a dialect pronounces phonemes/vowel sounds etc. For instance, in the English accent(s) the "schwa" sound is most pedominant (For more information on schwa see
this video.)
As an example, take a listen to
the audio in this video, even with vocoders the voices have their own distinct accent, they may be harder to make out, but they are still heard, the more predominant the accent is, the easier it is to identify.
Arguments AgainstA common argument made against this is that
all Civil Protection and Overwatch sound American in Half-Life 2. This is because Valve only had
American voice actors for the English version of the game. Just as like the Russian version of the game only has
Russian voice actors of which you can hear their accents clearly.
An argument I managed to come up with is that
the user's voice could be being fed back through a text-to-speech translator, with the translator detecting what words are being said and re-saying them out of the mask. In this case, everyone's voice would have the same accent. However the voice would be completely monotone all the time. Through listening to Overwatch and Civil Protection throughout the game, they express panic and visciousness in their tone e.g. "That's a grenade!" and "Take him down!" If the mentioned method was being used, their voices would show no emotion whatsoever.
The final argument I hear is that
the Combine's technology is vast, surely they can mask an accent. You could use that argument for anything to justify anything. I could say
the Combine's technology is vast, surely they have an ion cannon in space, we don't know there
isn't an ion cannon, and they just haven't used it yet, however we assume they don't unless evidence is put forward that suggest they do, because that's how burden of proof works.
ConclusionYes, accents
can be heard through vocoders. Does this present a threat to the anonymity of units? Not really, accents are shared by thousands of people and you wouldn't be able to distinguish between two of the same accent, or be able to distinguish a unit speaking without a mask via the sound of their voice through a vocoder due to the effects the vocoder puts on.
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