We live in dark times in which the shadow of Skynet and its colleagues created on zeros and ones begins to hang over us and, if we put aside the terrifying —for spectacular— artistic results that we can obtain after introducing a few commands to artificial intelligences such as Midjourney and we focus on the world of cinema, in the ‘Star Wars’ franchise we find a good example of this.
At this point we are more than used to George Lucas’s galactic saga showing off the latest technological advances to shape its productions, and there are the —still irregular— facial rejuvenation techniques that we have seen in titles like ‘The Mandalorian’ or ‘Rogue One’; but what the Vanity Fair medium has shared in its latest report goes one step further.
A voice worth an empire
For four decades, the now-legendary James Earl Jones has lent his voice to Darth Vader, but at 91 years of age, the time has come to retire. The funny thing is that his imperial retirement does not mean that we will stop hearing the only vibration of his vocal cords every time the fearsome villain speaks; something possible thanks to the magic of AI
If we stick our ear to a good sound system we can notice a appreciable difference in the sound of Vader’s voice from ‘Rogue One’ —more mature and according to Jones’ age— and that of the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ series —much more similar to that of forty years ago—. This is because in the Disney+ show technology using archival recordings has been used created by a Ukrainian company called Respeecher.
Matthew Wood, the sound editor who has overseen Respeecher’s work for Skywalker Sound, has called Jones “a benevolent godfather” at oversee the company’s efforts to mold the voice of Darth Vader as faithfully as possibleall this after being duly informed of his plans for the character’s future.
This is not the first time that Lucasfilm has used this resource to bring us back to one of its icons. Without going further, Luke Skywalker from ‘The Boba Fett Book’ already went through this process And you probably won’t be the only one. The future is here and, although it is a bit scary, there is no other way than to get used to it and pray that all these advances are used for good —even if it is in sequels and spin-offs of dubious quality—.