the illegitimate son of convention

[AFK]

I'm just churning them out left and right.  "Catching the Drift" has been added to both sites.  rwhn.multiply.com and www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention

Frenzied Destruction may enjoy this one as it features an abrasive/digital noise interlude.
Oh, and 000 may too as I buried some vocoder stuff in there as well.  It may be tough to pick out though. 

Unfortunately, since MySpace only lets you have 4 tracks up at a time, "The NoseFlute Experiment" has been taken down. 

And there was much rejoicing, huzzah!

[Triple Zero]

POINT ME TO THE VOCODER!!!

[AFK]

Well, you probably can't hear it too well.  I think I probably buried it too much with the other noise.  I've got three tracks going at that point.  I basically took that same stretch of noise and processed it three different ways, one was with a vocoder app. 

[AFK]

New song on the MySpace page.  Just click the link in my sig.

It's called The Flying Donkey Honky Tonk. 

[Payne]

I rather like that one, actually...

I even downloaded it.

[AFK]

[Payne]

I'm just not sure I'll ever be able to look my friends and family in the eye ever again.

[AFK]

So does that mean I'm a guilty pleasure?  Hooray!

[Darth Cupcake]

I will check some of this out when my coworker is out on lunch break.

But would someone please clarify for me wtf a vocoder is, since everyone is always going on about it? I feel so damned ign'nt!

[AFK]

Okay, do you remember the orignal Transformers theme-song.  You know the bit where it says "Robots in Disguise" and the voice is all roboty-sounding.  That's a vocoder.  I'm sure LMNO and 000 can give a better technical description.

[LMNO]

VERY basically:

A vocoder is a audio device that takes the variations in frequency of human speech and applies that to a single bandwidth of sound (called the "carrier wave").

This gives a "robotic" sound to a vocal track.  you can get the vocoder to "sing" by changing the carrier wave over time.


If this is confusing, this link might help.

[Darth Cupcake]

Jazzy. Thanks, I think that was pretty much what I needed!

[LMNO]

I had a project in school where I made the carrier wave a blast of feedback to which I made the modulator wave me reading from Revelations.


An interesting concept, but it didn't really work too well.  The carrier band was too large.

[AFK]

For the record, I think only one of my songs features vocoder.  And I didn't actually use it on voice, it was on some ambient noise I had recorded. 

[Triple Zero]

the more complicated explanation:

human voice consists of these parts:
- vocal chords, which make a sort of buzzing sound, the frequency of which you can modulate for singing or intonation.
- breath, which makes a sort of pink/white noise sound, used for consonants
- and the rest, which is basically the shape of your throat, mouth, movement of tongue, lips etc etc. i think part of it is called the "vocal tract". this bit is responsible for the creation of the phonemes, that make up speech. it doesn't produce sound on its own, it acts as a filter, "shaping" the buzzing and noisy sound made in your throat.
try saying "oowweeoiiiiioiwwoiwoooeieieieieiiiiwiwiwiiaoaaiiwwiwiowaoaiiauuwwioaiaiooiii" and you will get the point.

what a vocoder does, is it analyzes the speech sound (the modulator), splitting it in harmonic sound (the vocal chord), non-harmonic sound (the breath/noise) and the filter/shaper bit.
then you take another sound (the carrier), often a synthesizer buzz for a robot sound, and apply the filter/shaper thing to that sound. sometimes part of the non-harmonics is also mixed in to recreate the consonants, sometimes .. well there's all sorts of variations.

one thing is that the carrierwave needs to be rich in harmonics (or, not necessarily harmonics, it just needs a lot of different frequencies, mostly in the "formant" frequency bands, say, 0-4000Hz), which is probably why the feedback didn't work as a carrierwave, because it's usually a sound made up of one (or very few) frequencies.

a sort of variation on the vocoder, which bears mentioning because it's much simpler and can give almost the same kind of awesome effect, is the voicebox. there are probably again many variations, but the one i saw recently (at the Chromeo live concert) was a sort of speaker-on-a-stick coming out of a synthesizer, which the singer sort of deep-throated and then started to sing.
the idea here is that you don't use your vocal chords (much), but instead, play the synth in the tune you want to "sing", and move your mouth and throat as thought you were singing. it works, and it's awesome. (you need an extra mic apart from the synth to record the synthsound as modulated by your throat, of course)