Sim Voices: Any way to categorize them?

[chintznibbles]

So, as it turns out, two of my sims sound rather similar.  They both have a sort of husky voice, and it is inconvenient because they wound up falling in love, etc.  I'd prefer to have them at least sound different for the most part.  So, as I was flipping through things in SimPE, I notice the Voice Type field under Misc Sim Properties.  Both sims actually have different numbers, which shoots down my theory that they'd somehow rolled the same voices, but this leaves me back at square one.  I don't exactly want to go around randomly changing things- last time I did that I wound up having to restore some backup data since I somehow duplicated a sim and managed to hose my entire neighborhood- but I do want to decipher these voice codes.

They seem to be four digit hexes.  I wonder if they're global IDs for specific voices (all sound samples for a particular set) or perhaps each digit refers to a specific "chunk" of voices.  Sims that were made in the CAS at similar times have similar voice types: for instance, all the sims in one family are 0x0***.  I would have assumed their prefix digit was related to the sim's instance number, but a few instances later it started jumping from 0x0*** to 0xD*** to 0x5***, so the only explanation I can think of making sense is it is either tied to the family or the CAS batch they were made in.  I'm guessing that the three latter digits represent the specific voice details for a given sim, though I have no idea what they mean...

Anyone know more about this?  Maybe someone could write a SimPE voice analyzer plugin.  If you could figure out what files the number refers to, it might be possible to call them... oh well.  I think I've rambled on for long enough.

[Zeljka]

I went through an entire neighbourhood once (200+ characters) and listed the voice types for each gender and age group. There were times I thought I was uncovering a pattern, but I didn't end up with anything clear.

It did seem that those created in the same time ended up with the same voices, but changing 4 little girls in one home to have unique voices, most of what they said -their voices while saying it, was identical.
Many of the actions seem to have one sound bite per age group, toddler sounds, learning toddler skills, kids picking the money tree, talking on the phone, splashing etc..

The money tree, making out and woohoo sounds for Teen and up, seem to be the same for all of the age/gender group.

It wasn't a proper study though, just a changing a few variables.

[simposiast]

I always assumed that the game picks two different voices for each conversation, regardless of which sims are speaking, so you can tell there are two speakers when both sims are the same age and gender. Unfortunately I don't have a very good memory for sounds, so I've never been able to tell whether that's true or not.