Staticfree Blog

I got myself a vocoder. Well, a vocoder plugin. With it, I can sound like a robot.

You've probably heard a vocoder, but not heard of a vocoder. They're quite popular in electronic music, used heavily by bands like Kraftwerk and Freezepop. It's a audio filter that takes two sources, the carrier and the formant. The formant is the human voice source and the carrier is commonly a simple waveform, say an 80Hz sawtooth wave. Parts of the formant is filtered out and replaced by the carrier, weaving the natural and the generated sound sources into one synthetic-sounding voice that retains most of the voice's pronunciation.

I put together a little network in Galan that had both "analog" and simple wave carriers. I put a cross-fader between the two carriers so they could be changed or combined. I found with an equal balance of an 80Hz sawtooth carrier and a 350Hz "analog" triangle-wave carrier produced a pretty decent robotic voice.

I used the vocoder on my red-robot costume for Halloween. Unfortunately, my laptop speakers weren't loud enough to drown out my voice and so I just sounded incomprehensible with it. I'll have to get some battery-powered speakers and a USB joystick to manually control the carrier frequencies for next time.