Val Kilmer partially lost his voice after undergoing a tracheotomy in 2014, derived from throat cancer that had been diagnosed a few weeks before, but that has not prevented the star from Hollywood make a very special cinematic comeback in the hit movie ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, starring Tom Cruise.
The actor’s unmistakable voice, from years, has been recreated for the big screen thanks to artificial intelligence, specifically through innovative software created by the company Sonantic, a firm that was born as a humble ‘start-up’ to consolidate itself in a matter of just a few years as one of the most sought-after companies in the film industry.
“From the beginning, our goal was to create a voice model that Val could be proud of. We were looking forward to giving her voice back, through a tool that will be used for any type of project in the audiovisual world”, said the founder and managing director of Sonantic, John Flynn, in conversation with Fortune magazine.
As a general rule, the company’s engineers create a given voice model from of sounds pre-recorded by the performers themselves. However, in the case of Val Kilmer, it took Sonantic professionals a little more “hands-on” work to overcome these additional hurdles.
Therefore, they had to “clean up” some old recordings of the actor and use a voice engine so that the previously created pattern could truly sound like Val Kilmer.
The company had to develop new algorithms in order to produce a voice model of high quality and, obviously, as faithful as possible to the original timbre of the famous performer.
As has been verified in the aforementioned film, a direct sequel to ‘Top Gun’ (1986), the result of such an arduous and laborious process was to the liking of the artist, its director Joseph Kosinski, and Tom Cruise himself.