Tranquility Base · 30 Sep 2026

Dying, he sounds fine.

Baymax's voice only trails off for a flat battery, never for his death. Low power slides him 19 semitones in 1.1 seconds. At the portal, where he actually goes, nothing touches the voice.

Needs you · nothing to decide

Nothing to decide. The three rules near the bottom are the part worth keeping.

An investigation, measured from the audio: pitch, loudness and timing of every Baymax line in three scenes.

Six claims · the audio sits under each

1"Low battery" falls without a break from 188 Hz to 63 Hz.One continuous glide across the second word, no step, no cut−18.8 st

Baymax, eyes half closed, leaning and pointing at Hiro in the police station — The frame at the moment the line lands, 9.3 s into the clip: eyes half shut, posture gone. Grabbed from the YouTube upload, 21 Sep 2026. The play button opens a new tab, because the hub serves pages sandboxed with no origin and the YouTube player refuses to run there. Watch the scene

Pitch (dots, log scale) with loudness as the shaded area. The unbroken diagonal from 1.0 s to 2.1 s is the glide; nothing interrupts it. Autocorrelation tracker, 40 ms window, 10 ms hop, on the clip audio at 16 kHz mono.

'Low': 151 Hz -> 246 Hz (+8.5 st) over 0.45s
battery glide: 188 Hz -> 63 Hz, -18.8 semitones over 1.10s, slope -19.1 st/s, 108 frames

Output of the pitch tracker over the two words, 21 Sep 2026. "Low" lurches upward first; "battery" is the fall.

A semitone every 52 ms. The word takes roughly twice its normal time, and the pitch drops by a factor of three while it does.

2The fall is a constant-rate slide, not a fade or a step.A straight line in semitones fits it almost exactlyr² 0.985

semitones r2=0.985
hertz     r2=0.977

Linear fit of the 108 glide frames, in semitones and in hertz. Semitones fit better, which is what a constant-rate slowdown of a mechanism produces.

This is a tape-stop, not a volume fade. A cut or a fade alone reads as a dropout; the even slide reads as a machine winding down, which is why it is funny rather than alarming.

3He ends an octave below his own floor, and fades 13 dB getting there.63 Hz against a normal register that bottoms out near 100−13.4 dB

loudness: -28.4 dB at glide start -> -41.8 dB at glide end (-13.4 dB fade)
normal register p10: 101 Hz ("I will scan you now"), 116 Hz ("I cannot deactivate...")

Loudness and the 10th percentile of pitch in the two sober lines, same tracker, same session.

Pitch and loudness fall on the same curve. The endpoint is below anything he says when healthy, so the last syllable is somewhere the character has never been.

4Low-power Baymax does not slow down, he widens his pitch.Same sentence, drunk and sober: 3.0 s against 3.6 s+6 st range

Every measured line, sober and low-power. Range is the 10th to 90th percentile of pitch; slope is the tilt across the whole phrase.
Line	Median	Range	Slope	Length
Sober · "I will scan you now. Scan complete."	125 Hz	12.0 st	+3.8 st/s	3.6 s
Sober · "I cannot deactivate until you say…"	191 Hz	11.5 st	−0.3 st/s	4.9 s
Low power · "Low battery."	169 Hz	20.0 st	−10.2 st/s	2.2 s
Low power · "I'm healthcare, your personal Baymax companion"	172 Hz	11.3 st	−2.0 st/s	4.2 s
Low power · "I will scan you now. Scan complete."	216 Hz	17.6 st	−6.6 st/s	3.0 s
Portal · "There is no time. Are you satisfied with your care?"	132 Hz	13.7 st	−0.1 st/s	3.9 s

Plateaus inside a narrow band. The same sentence, from the introduction scene.

Higher peaks, a long fall inside each word, and the second phrase starts a fifth above the first.

Slurring came out as melody, not as tempo. He is the same speed and the same pitch or higher; what changes is that every phrase sags and the range opens by about six semitones.

5At the portal, where he actually dies, the voice is untouched.Flat, low, intact, then silence−0.1 st/s

The last question, at 132 Hz median with no tilt across the phrase. The ends of "time" and "care" reach 73 Hz, the bottom of his register, used as weight. Same tracker; the score runs under the dialogue here, so the loudness area is the least reliable of the four.

"Hiro, I will always be with you"   flat frames: 80%   gliding: 16%
"There is no time. Are you satisfied with your care?"   slope -0.1 st/s

Share of frames holding pitch versus moving, over both farewell lines.

The shutdown is carried by the eyes and the score. Degrading the voice here would have said malfunction; the scene means choice, so the voice stays whole and then stops.

6The low-power personality was a late note, not the original design.Scott Adsit had the character settled before it arrivedmid-production

And then they said, okay, so we've decided that when Baymax is low power, his personality changes, and he gets a little bit unsteady on his feet. And so that aspect of Baymax kind of slurring his words and being a little playful and a little more emotional was totally out of left field. And I thought, is this gonna work? And they were right.

Scott Adsit, the voice of Baymax, to CinemaBlend, on direction given about halfway through the film.

The measurements match what he describes. "Playful and more emotional" is the widened range and the sagging phrases; "slurring" is not slower speech, which is the part the ear gets wrong.

Three rules for a voice that has to run down

·Running down is a slide, not a step.15 to 20 st / 1 s

One continuous glide, loudness falling 10 to 15 dB on the same curve, ending below the voice's normal floor. A cut or a fade alone reads as a dropout.

·Degraded is not slower.3.0 s vs 3.6 s

The impaired state keeps its tempo and widens its pitch. The loss of control is heard in the melody, not on the clock.

·Do not degrade the voice at the end.−0.1 st/s

A deliberate ending gets the intact voice, low and level, then nothing. Degrade it and it says malfunction instead of decision.

Two things this could not settle

·Whether the glide was performed or applied in the mix.unresolved

The pitch drop (a factor of three) exceeds the time stretch (about two), which is what an accelerating varispeed ramp on a performed glide would give. Not confirmable from a mixed clip with score under it, and the sound team's published interviews cover the squeaky exercise ball behind Baymax's body sounds, not this line.

·Fandom and TV Tropes would not serve their transcripts.402 / 403

Dialogue came from Wikiquote and from whisper.cpp over the clip audio instead, which is why every line quoted here has a timestamp behind it.

This replaces an earlier page. Same measurements, rebuilt in the house shape; the previous version is baymax-trailing-off.

Measured 21 Sep 2026 from three fan uploads of Big Hero 6 scenes, audio only at 16 kHz mono: word timings from whisper.cpp small.en, pitch from a 40 ms autocorrelation tracker at 10 ms hop over 60 to 400 Hz. Sources: CinemaBlend interview with Scott Adsit, Disney Digital Studio Services on the mix, Wikiquote.