Guilhem Gallart used to talk with a thick, southern French accent, his voice deep and barely nasal, topped by a faint lisp.
Then, in 2015, he was recognized with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., an incurable neurological illness that slowly paralyzed his muscle mass from head to toe, leaving him bedridden and forcing him to make use of a voice-synthesizing laptop program to talk.
Now, his household jokes with him that he feels like a GPS system. His spouse and two daughters, Mr. Gallart stated, generally name his outdated cellphone quantity simply to listen to his voice mail greeting.
Losing his distinctive voice, he stated, has felt like surrendering a necessary a part of himself, as sound has been his life’s ardour. Better referred to as Pone, he’s a music producer and beatmaker who as soon as belonged to one in all France’s hottest old-school rap teams, the Fonky Family.
In a bid to recapture his signature vocal sound, Pone, 50, has launched into a barely quixotic and still-unfinished quest. Because there weren’t sufficient outdated recordings of his voice to feed into a pc and create an artificial alternative, he requested a comic to document an imitation of what he used to sound like — and used that as a foundation as a substitute.
“A voice is a very personal thing,” Pone stated, propped up in mattress at his house in Gaillac, a small city close to Toulouse in southwestern France. The approach you discuss “says volumes about your character,” he added, immediately conveying a lot of who you’re. Even if, as he jokingly described his voice in a documentary about his life, he “really sounded like an idiot.”
In 2020, he contacted Marc-Antoine Le Bret, a 37-year-old comedian identified for superstar impressions, asking for his assist in creating a brand new voice to match his outdated one.
“The challenge was absolutely crazy,” Mr. Le Bret recalled considering. He had by no means met Pone, however instantly agreed. “It’s the most beautiful challenge of my lifetime.”
Mr. Le Bret immersed himself in outdated audio and video recordings of Pone, like clips from a household trip to Morocco. He additionally watched footage of Pone’s band.
Pone didn’t sing or rap within the Fonky Family, which bought a whole bunch of 1000’s of albums within the Nineties and 2000s with fiery raps concerning the hardscrabble streets of Marseille. But Mr. Le Bret listened for snatches of Pone’s voice in interviews, behind-the-scenes footage of live shows and studio chatter in recording periods.
Mr. Le Bret subsequent labored on refining his impression. But it wasn’t simple.
Pone was born and raised in Toulouse, the place he fell in love with hip-hop as an adolescent, earlier than transferring to Marseille. The two cities have barely totally different however equally sturdy accents, with the silent “e” not all the time so silent. (The pronunciation of “Pone” varies from Paris to the south, however the “e” is silent in each locales.)
Mr. Le Bret needed to seize Pone’s tone, too, and stated he had “tried to absorb” Pone’s approach of expressing himself, with out slipping into caricature. “He’s a wisecracker, he loves irony, and that was important,” he stated.
Getting the intonation proper was important to Wahiba Gallart, Pone’s spouse, and the final one who might perceive him earlier than he switched to the impersonal, digitally generated voice.
“Sometimes he’ll tell us something and the computer’s tone is flat, cold,” she stated. That makes him sound extra abrupt than supposed. “It was important for him to recover as much of his former self as possible, for our daughters,” she added.
Once Mr. Le Bret felt his impression was shut sufficient, he voiced about 250 inventory phrases in a recording studio, lots of them nonsensical sentences designed to supply the correct stability of phonemes to feed a program designed by SweetVoice, a digital voice processing and synthesizing firm.
Ms. Gallart attended the three-hour session, correcting and guiding Mr. Le Bret. Pone, and his household, might hardly look forward to the outcomes.
Family is Pone’s pillar. His dad and mom and half-siblings typically go to the house in Gaillac, the place marriage ceremony and trip pictures cling not removed from gold and platinum data celebrating the rap and R&B hits he produced in his solo profession after the Fonky Family broke up in 2007.
His daughters, Naïla, 15, and Jasmine, 12, typically clamber onto his mattress to talk, watch motion pictures or play video video games.
And final yr, the daughters’ smiles grew huge as they gathered to take heed to Pone use the brand new voice for the primary time — a second captured by a nationwide tv news crew.
The outcomes earned a combined assessment.
The voice was artificial however distinctly southern, and really near his authentic one. Unfortunately it was additionally buggy. Longer sentences had been garbled; syllables had been often dropped. Pone was fast to identify the glitches.
“I was dealing with a sound engineer, an expert,” stated Jean-Luc Crebouw, the founding father of SweetVoice. He stated Pone had grown used to the neutral-sounding artificial voice, which made the kinks within the new one stand out much more.
But the experiment was profitable sufficient that Pone stated he wished to maintain going, and he has contacted different corporations to fine-tune the brand new voice.
“Using my actual voice was a plus,” he stated. “I was able to express myself again.”
New synthetic intelligence and computer-generated speech instruments are providing hope to sufferers with speech-impeding ailments, though these approaches usually require individuals to both nonetheless be capable to communicate or have a reasonably large library of recordings of their voice.
Pone, who misplaced his voice earlier than these applied sciences had been out there, wanted the extra inventive answer of partnering with Mr. Le Bret. In current weeks, he has tried totally different A.I. instruments, however the outcomes had been “very disappointing,” he stated, and for now, he has reverted to his outdated artificial voice.
When he needs to talk, an infrared sensor tracks his eyes as they transfer throughout a keyboard on a display, enabling him to write down textual content that’s then learn out in a monotone. The course of is gradual. During an interview, minutes of silence between every reply had been damaged solely by the rhythmic whooshing of his synthetic respirator and the occasional beep of his gastric feeding machine.
The problem Pone set himself to recapture his voice isn’t the one one he has taken on since being recognized eight years in the past with a illness whose imply survival time, in accordance with the A.L.S. Association, is 2 to 5 years.
Pone can not spend hours improvising with samples in a studio. But since his analysis, he has began a music label and, utilizing his eyes to function music software program, he has launched a number of albums, together with one based mostly fully on Kate Bush samples. He additionally produced a combination for the handover ceremony of the Paralympic Games, held in Tokyo in 2020 and scheduled for Paris in 2024.
He began an “A.L.S. for Dummies” web site and wrote a not too long ago printed autobiography. Pone stated he had all the time been hyperactive. “Now,” he added, “I’m just in more of a hurry.”
Since the analysis, Pone stated he had develop into a “better version” of himself, uncluttered by fleeting distractions and targeted on the necessities.
A.L.S. “left me what mattered most,” he writes in his autobiography. “My mind and my heart.”
He transformed to Islam within the mid-2000s, and he stated his religion had helped him discover internal peace. “It’s all about acceptance,” he stated. “And I have accepted.”
He does miss life’s tactile pleasures, like strolling on a sandy seashore or hugging a liked one. And touchdown a punchline is tough when it’s a must to sort it together with your eyes.
While the illness has stolen his speech and far else, he and his household stated it had solely strengthened their bonds.
Jasmine is just too younger to recollect what her father seemed like and stated she was excited to listen to a greater model of his “new” voice. Still, the present one has grown on her. “When he is joking or is happy, I almost feel like the intonation changes,” she stated.
“It’s not really the voice of a robot anymore,” she added. “It’s my dad’s.”
Source: www.nytimes.com