This page opens with the Chipmunk voice: pitch and formants both up 7 semitones, with your timing unchanged. Record a few words or upload a clip and it plays back high and squeaky straight away.
Why chipmunks sound the way they do
A cartoon chipmunk sounds tiny because everything about the voice is scaled up together: the note it speaks on and the resonances of its throat and mouth, the formants. The original records got there with tape speed: voices recorded slowly and played back twice as fast came out an octave higher. The catch is that speed changes timing too, so the actors had to speak at half pace.
This tool shifts the pitch and the formants by the same amount instead, 7 semitones on this page (about 1.5 times the frequency), and leaves the timing alone. You talk normally and get the chipmunk.
Chipmunk, Helium or Higher voice
Three presets raise your voice in different ways, and hearing them side by side on one recording is the quickest way to understand pitch and formants:
- Chipmunk: pitch and formants up together. High, tiny, cartoonish.
- Helium: formants up, pitch unchanged. What actually happens when you breathe helium: you sound smaller but on the same notes.
- Higher voice: pitch up 4, formants up 2. A lighter voice that still sounds like a person.
Tips
Speak clearly and a little more slowly than usual, since fast consonants blur at high shifts. Laughing and singing work surprisingly well as a chipmunk. For an even more cartoonish result, open Fine-tune and add a short Echo. Download the result as WAV or MP3, or send a friend a link with Share result so they can try the same setting on their own voice.
The settings on this page
pitch +7 · formant +7. Every setting can be changed under Fine-tune; the page only chooses where it starts.