Animalese generator: make Animal Crossing style babble
The villagers of Animal Crossing do not speak words: they babble in a fast, high, cheerful sound that fans call Animalese. People want it for fan videos, game prototypes, chat bots and typing sounds.
This guide explains how Animalese generators work, which free open-source ones exist, and how to give one a new voice by voicing your own letter sounds with the free SuperClonica engine. Animal Crossing belongs to Nintendo; the tools here are fan projects.
How Animalese generators work
Fan generators approximate the sound rather than copy it: each letter of the text becomes a very short recorded sound, raised in pitch and played quickly one after another. The Korean PyAnimalese project, for example, takes the first consonant of each syllable, plays a short recorded sound for it with a randomly raised pitch and joins them. That is why the result follows the rhythm of the text but has no real words.
Free generators you can use
animalese.js by Acedio is a JavaScript approximation with an online demo. The Python Animalese audio generator under the MIT license turns a sentence into a WAV file and has pitch options from lowest to high. PyAnimalese, also MIT, does the same for Korean text, and the Animalese Typing extension plays the sounds as you type.
Give it your own voice
The Python generator reads 30 short files from a folder per pitch, sounds/med/sound01.wav to sound30.wav: 01 to 26 are the letters a to z, 27 is th, 28 is sh, 29 is the space and 30 the full stop. Make a new folder, sounds/mine, write a short syllable for each letter, such as “ah”, “beh”, “keh”, install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and, in Python, after from superclonica import Superclonica and tts = Superclonica(), then for n, syllable in enumerate(syllables, 1): audio, rate = tts.synthesize(syllable, voice="voice.json", lang="en", seed=1); tts.save(f"sounds/mine/sound{n:02d}.wav", audio). Keep 29 and 30 as short silences, then run the generator with --pitch mine.
Pick the voice
High, bright voices work best: a cartoon or kids voice keeps the cute sound, a low voice makes a grumpy villager. Try voices free on their pages with a line of 30 to 100 characters, no account needed. Use the same voice and seed for every letter so the babble sounds like one character.
When you need real words
Animalese has no words, so it suits short reactions and typing sounds. For a character who must say real lines, such as instructions in a game or a story in a video, use text to speech instead: the same catalog voices read whole sentences in 31 languages; Chinese is not supported yet. Share fan creations as fan content, without presenting them as Nintendo’s.