How Toby Fox made Flowey’s voice
So it is pretty well known nowadays that Flowey’s voice clips are originally from Ronald Mc Donald in a commercial from the 60′s : https://youtu.be/TCyNIKA-uhs?t=132
What isn’t as well known however, is how did Toby go from this to the final Flowey voice ?
The main inspiration for Flowey was the “you are an idiot” trojan, a harmless “virus” from the 2000′s that made countless pop ups appear on the computer calling the user an idiot with an edited high pitched voice followed by a still high pitched evil laugh all the while looking at the user with a friendly looking smiley face colored in black and white. Enough to give déjà vu to any UT fan... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48rz8udZBmQ
When trying to come up with a voice for Flowey, what Toby decided was to try and make Ronald Mc Donald sound more like the “you are an idiot” trojan (Why did Toby choose Ronald Mc Donald ? The world may never know). He took the audio clip and used a program to modify it, which resulted in the following edited voice clips : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rq6J5tK2qg&list=LLWVTSQBEYlLjuWLz0BK5aHQ&index=7
All of the sounds effects, voiced lines and unused voices lines for Flowey come from this same 1 minute clip.
In addition, thanks to the joys of reverse engineering, we actually know exactly which modifications Toby made to the clip in order to get that result, and thus we know what is the canon “Flowey voice filter” to have a Flowey voice accurate to how Toby Fox imagined it. This can be particularly useful for anyone wanting to voice act Flowey.
How to recreate Flowey’s canon voice :
Record yourself saying the lines you want Flowey to say whilst trying to imitate Ronald Mc Donald’s voice.
Use an audio editing program such as Audacity for example.
Load your audio file and verify that it plays properly.
Create an identical copy of that audio file so that you have it twice. I’ll call them file A and file B in the next steps.
Select file A and modify it so that its pitch is increased by 5 semitones compared to the original.
Select file B and modify it so that its pitch is increased by 8 semitones compared to the original.
Play file A and file B at the same time.
And there you go !
