Unused Sounds in SS1?

Trance on 19/9/2007 at 23:25

Earlier today I was poking around DIGIFX.RES in the Shock/DATA folder with (http://www.doomworld.com/xwe/) XWE flipping through the list of sounds when I came across two that I'd never heard in the game before. One was probably an extra enemy noise or ambient sound they just didn't get a chance to implement, but the other one had me wondering.

The first one is (http://ravenpics.250free.com/ss-maybeforeign.wav) here. Note that I changed this around from its original state, which can be found in that .RES file with XWE under 0031.VOC. All I did, though, was reverse it in Audacity and speed it up to 150%. At this point, the speech (although masked somewhat behind obnoxious data noises) resembles coherent human speech, though most likely not English. I wouldn't know which language it might be, but I do know that there are plenty of users here from other countries. Can anyone get something intelligible out of this?

(http://ravenpics.250free.com/attackingus.wav) The second one surprised me when I heard it. This clip, 0114.VOC, stands alone, there are no other SFX present in that file like that. It makes me wonder if the developers originally had planned for the player to have active allies in the game. Now in a game as old as SS1, the allies probably wouldn't be smart enough for the player to want to keep them with him, so I could understand why that part might have been cut, but I can't think of many more uses this sound effect may have had.

I've always been interested (actually fascinated) with the sounds and voices of the System Shock series. It's the System Shock games alone that made me decide to pursue a career as a sound artist. Oftentimes I would listen to the sound of one of System Shock's myriad humanoid enemies to unravel the series of filters and techniques used to turn the human voice into the inhuman. So someday I might put up samples of my System Shock soundalike voice clips. If anyone has any information on Eric Brosius' sound editing techniques, I'd love to read whatever you've got.

EDIT: Something else I noticed.... none of the logs, sounds or announcements in these files follow the standard audio sample rates (11025Hz, 22050Hz, etc). When did these standardized rates come into common practice? I'd wondered why the VMAIL.WAV sound effect in the .RES file sounded higher-pitched than the VMAIL.WAV I had set as my MSN "Contact Online" noise. I wonder if I would need to resample one of these sounds to use it in a mod for a newer engine.

catbarf on 20/9/2007 at 00:32

Pretty cool. The first doesn't sound like human speech to me, though... and I think the second would probably be as part of a log, where someone is talking and then some lackey runs up and tells him they're under attack.

Trance on 20/9/2007 at 04:03

I'm not so sure. To my untrained American ear the first one sounds like it might be from around India/the Middle East. If it is just random syllables spliced together (like the cyborg drone sounds) then they must just be a lucky combination, because it sounds like a guy holding one part of a conversation in another language. You can sort of hear another voice cut in at the very end of the clip.

Martin Karne on 20/9/2007 at 05:00

About .VOC files, those were used for earlier Sound Blaster cards, and there were very different and non commonly used audio rates, 20KHz, 16KHz, 14KHz, 12KHz, 8000Hz some thing, 4000Hz some thing and so on, you might get some more ideas on their sampling frequencies in Duke Nukem 3D that used a lot of those VOC files, at least Sound Forge 6, would show their sampling rates before opening them.
No wonder you hear a strange pitch when you open a sound file.

kodan50 on 20/9/2007 at 05:16

I've heard stuff like that as well with WXE, maybe just extra stuff that never found it's way into the game? Makes for more fun to poke with, I wonder what other treats we can find :p

cosmicnut on 20/9/2007 at 08:48

The first file sounds like the noise the main bots made, I think. It was definatly in the game. They probably used a non-english speaker and fudged around with the sound.
It give it a "pattern" that sounds like communication rather than randon noise.

It might not have been the main bot but definatly one of the effects used to by somethign mechanical.

The second file... If I remember the story, the humans made a last stand the other side of a radaiation hazard with a force bridge for access. This could have been from an event they tried to get to work but got cut out during alpha / beta testing and they forgot to remove the audio clip.

D'Arcy on 20/9/2007 at 12:43

The first one actually sounds a lot like SHODAN in the floppy disk version. There was no speech in that version, so whenever SHODAN would interrupt an e-mail from Lansing you'd hear a very similar sound to this one. Except that for some reason this sample makes me think of garbled german speaking.

Kolya on 20/9/2007 at 13:32

Quote Posted by D'Arcy

garbled german speaking.

Yeah sounds like German, the start sounds like "Ich bin eigent-"(lich). Then there's a cut, the last word which is pronounced like a question is "ordentlich".
It may be cut and spliced because it's very hard to understand what he says in the middle part. It does have a southern sound, could be Bavarian dialect, Austrian or Swiss.

Angel Dust on 20/9/2007 at 13:54

Quote Posted by D'Arcy

I think I still have that floppy version around here somewhere. Can't install it to check though since I have no floppy drive anymore.

ZylonBane on 20/9/2007 at 15:49

Quote Posted by Trance

(http://ravenpics.250free.com/attackingus.wav) The second one surprised me when I heard it. This clip, 0114.VOC, stands alone, there are no other SFX present in that file like that. It makes me wonder if the developers originally had planned for the player to have active allies in the game.

Oh good lord. That sound clip is part of the "Wing 0" game soft.