Dante’s Voice

In the poem Dante speaks and the damned answer him in whole words; in the mud of the Styx the sullen do not, they gurgle in their throats what they cannot say with a whole word. In the game Dante has one voice only, the voice of whoever plays: with the microphone on, every syllable you say sets off two of his, made like the voices of the damned, with your pitch and your strength. The words are lost, the rhythm, the tone and the loudness stay. It is turned on with the “Dante’s voice” box in the main menu, or when a new game offers it, and tried out on the microphone page of the options.

The voice is breath, and breath is trace: no beast listens to the microphone, the voice goes into the field the way breathing does. Speaking doubles the trace, like a run. Holding your breath, one word is enough to break it, and to hold it again the key has to be released, as when the air runs out. Under water whoever speaks uses up the air three times as fast. There are places where you have to be completely silent: the blind man of the pass hears whoever breathes, and a voice reaches him even from behind a shelter; Minos, if you speak close to him while he counts, loses the count; the black bitches of the wood of the suicides hear a voice even inside a thornbush and come at you as long as you speak; in the first ditch of Malebolge, while the horned demons count the line, a voice is one body too many and they drag you back up; and in Lucifer’s wind whoever speaks opens his mouth to the frost, even holding his breath.

Dante’s voice changes with him: with fear it shakes, with the head under water it gurgles. In a colloquy, with the voice on, the answer you choose is said by him before the soul replies. The game only hears whether you are speaking or silent: speaking starts a little above the background noise of the room, and the click of a keyboard is not a voice.

The threshold can also be yours. On the microphone page, and in the pause, the line “your voice” shows how loud you are speaking on ten diamonds, and the red one is where Dante starts: if a fan or the room lights it up on their own, you move it to the right; all the way to the left, the game places it. Loudness is measured above 150 Hz, where the wind of a fan on the microphone hardly reaches and the voice does.