The Voice of the Damned

In the poem every soul that stops Dante speaks, and the verse says how: Farinata rises with his chest and his brow, Cavalcante says it weeping, Ciacco answers from under the rain, Pier della Vigna comes out of a broken branch along with the blood. In the game those traits are the numbers of a throat. It is not voice acting and it is not speech synthesis: it is a glottal pulse inside three formants, which is how a vowel gets made. The syllables follow one another and say nothing, but the timbre, the pitch, the tremor and the way a sentence closes belong to a person, and the text on screen uncovers itself at the pace the speaker keeps. The reason is one of picture too: a recorded voice over an image drawn at a third of full size would be the only high definition thing in the game. It holds from the dark wood down, where the one soul that stops you is Duccio.

Eleven throats are written by hand, and their traits are in the verses. Charon sits at sixty eight hertz, the deepest of all, slow and wet because he speaks from the water; Farinata at eighty eight, clean and without tremor; Nicholas III at ninety six, very closed, because he speaks upside down inside a hole; Virgil at a hundred and two, hoarse but steady, «chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco», and the calmest in the game because near him fear goes quiet; Francesca at a hundred and ninety six, high and breathed, the only one who speaks of love. Anybody not in the table is given a throat derived from their own name: two different souls never share a voice, and the same soul has the same one in every game. The key is the one the canto stages the soul with, not what it is called.

Only what stands between quotation marks is spoken: many of the game’s lines mix speech and narration, and the narration stays mute because nobody says it. A line never runs longer than seven seconds however long it is, and what speeds up is not the throat’s pace, which stays that soul’s own: it is the syllables, which cover more text, and the breaths between one sentence and the next, which shorten by the same amount. The voice comes out of the body and not out of the listener’s head, which is the only way to tell where it is coming from when somebody walks ahead of you in the dark. And a soul you have not answered yet calls out to you by itself within fifteen metres, about every ten seconds, saying only the first piece of what it has to tell you: it is how you find them, because before that a damned soul standing still in a black valley was met only by walking into it.