Uncanny Speech - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 222

acters will be perceived as more strange when the
speech sounds too mechanical or too human-like
in relation to the fidelity of human-likeness for a
character's appearance. A character may appear
more natural and be perceived as more familiar
once the fidelity of human-likeness for speech
is adjusted to be regarded as matching that of a
character's appearance.

a time like those of radio announcers filled the
theatre” (p. 64). As Tinwell and Grimshaw state,
paraphrasing Spadoni, (2010) the unique textures
and delivery style for Dracula's speech increased
the uncanny for Dracula:

Dracula's voice, the ethereal voice of the undead,
is compared to the voice of reason and materiality
that is Van Helsing's. In the former, the uncanny
is marked by uneven and slow pronunciation,
staggered rhythm and a foreign (that is, not Eng-
lish) accent and all this produces a disconnect
between body and speech. Van Helsing's speech,
by contrast, is the embodiment of corporiality;
authoritative, clearly enunciated and rational in
its delivery and meaning.

QUALItIEs OF sPEEcH

Bizarre qualities and textures of speech served to
gratify the pleasure humans sought in frighten-
ing themselves with early horror film talkies, for
example the monster in Browning's (1931) film
Dracula . Some cinematic theorists argue that the
success of films such as Dracula was due to an
uncanny modality that occurred during the tran-
sition between silent to sound cinema (Spadoni,
2000, p. 2). Sounds that may have been perceived
as unreal or strange due to technical restrictions of
sound recording and production at the time were
used to the advantage of the character Dracula.
For early sound film, to produce the most
intelligible dialogue for the viewer, the recording
process required that words were pronounced
slowly, emphasizing every “syl-la-ble” (Spadoni,
2000, p. 15). However, whilst words could be
easily interpreted by the viewer, this impeded
delivery style made the speech sound unnatural
and unreal. Delivery of speech style also influ-
enced how strange Dracula was perceived to be.
In the role of Dracula, the acoustics of Bela
Lugosi's speech set the standard for what the
“voice of horror” should be (Spadoni, 2000, pp.
63-70). The weird textures of Bela Lugosi's voice
were manipulated to create a greater conceptual
peculiarity for the viewer, thus setting the epony-
mous character apart from other horror films.
The distinctive vocal tone and pronunciation of
Dracula's speech were characteristics that critics
acclaimed as the most shocking and chilling; “slow
painstaking voices pronouncing each syllable at

For zombie characters in computer games,
comparisons have been made with horror film
talkies as to the methods used to create and modify
sound to induce an ambience of fear (Brenton
et al., 2005; Perron, 2004; Roux-Girard, 2011;
Toprac & Abdel-Meguid, 2011). Results from
the UM study by Tinwell and Grimshaw (2009)
to define cross-modal influences of image and
sound and the uncanny in virtual characters show
that particular qualities of speech (similar to those
observed for early horror talkies) can exaggerate
how uncanny a virtual character is perceived
to be. Thirteen video clips of one human and
twelve virtual characters in different settings and
engaged in different activities were presented to
100 participants. The twelve virtual characters
consisted of six realistic, human-like characters:
(1) the Emily Project (2008) and (2) the Warrior
(2008) both by Image Metrics; (3) Mary Smith
from The Casting (Quantic Dream, 2006); (4) Alex
Shepherd from Silent Hill Homecoming (Konami,
2008) and two avatars (5) Louis and (6) Francis
from Left 4 Dead (Valve, 2008); four zombie
characters, (7) a Smoker, (8) The Infected, (9) The
Tank and (10) The Witch from Left 4 Dead ; (11) a
stylised, human-like Chatbot character “Lillien”
(Daden Ltd, 2006); (12) a realistic, human-like