Higher Voice For Curie

Higher Voice For Curie

Higher Voice For Curie

Let me preface by saying that I have no personal misgivings with Curie’s default voice. I think it’s great. It’s certainly head and shoulders above what we got for the female player’s voice. Happily, because Curie’s voice is pitched at a natural register – meaning it doesn’t dip so low that it’s constantly going hoarse and/or “frying”, the way the female protagonist’s voice does – adjustments to the voice can render some decently agreeable results.

I put this mod together solely because I have a personal preference for female voices that err on the higher side of the vocal spectrum, and it did not take me long to decide that I really like Curie the companion. It behooved me to tweak things to my liking, just as I will be adjusting a whole slew of things in the game in the weeks and months to come. It doesn’t take an excessive amount of extra work to make my results available to others, so here they are.

The demonstration video contains spoilers for anyone who hasn’t traveled with Curie for a while!

Spoiler Show

Voice Types:

Note: On the whole, the pitch of the voice isn’t much changed in any of these voice types, but what does change appreciably is the apparent age of the voice. Each step higher primarily means a somewhat younger-sounding voice.

Please also note: First of all, the compression used on Curie’s default vanilla voice has rendered it slightly corrupt-sounding. Actually, this goes for a lot of the voices in the game, but Curie’s voice in particular lost a lot of high-frequency detail. Tweaking such a result further will of course not improve matters.

Secondly, Curie’s voice, being that of a robot, comes packaged with a playing-through-a-speaker quality which unfortunately does not tolerate pitch adjustments well. The dialogue becomes increasingly difficult to discern, and I don’t recommend going past Type A4. However… (Spoilers if you haven’t traveled with Curie for a bit.)

Spoiler Show

Voice Type A1: 3% higher.

Voice Type A2: 6% higher.

Voice Type A3: 9% higher.

Voice Type A4: 12.2% higher.

Voice Type A5: 15.6% higher.

Voice Type A6: 18.9% higher. It’s beginning to sound a little artificial at this point.

Installation (as of 2015-11-27):

1. Make sure your Fallout4Prefs.ini (typically located in C:\Users\(your username)\My Documents\My Games\Fallout4) has had “bEnableFileSelection=1” added under the “[Launcher]” category. Afterward, change the file’s properties to “read only” so your modification doesn’t get overwritten. (You will need to undo and redo this whenever you want to make other changes, such as graphics settings.)

2. Add the name of the esp file of your chosen voice type (for example: “Higher Voice For Curie – Type A4.esp”) to the plugins.txt file, which is typically located in C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Fallout4.

3. Extract the contents of the archive to your Fallout4\Data\ directory.

Uninstall:

1. Remove the archive’s extracted contents from your Fallout4\Data\ directory.

2. Remove the name of the esp file from your plugins.txt file.

Other:

I hope this mod is of use to others.