Talk box & Vocoder

When teaching composers about voice, giving a class on the talk box & the vocoder is a great complement. Here are a couple of notes I took to prepare the class I'm giving tomorrow.

Talk box

The talk box is mostly known as an effect enabling to apply vocalic sound colors to guitar sounds. My teaching material includes:

  • a copy of the original patent for an electronic voice box apparatus, designed to be used as an artificial larynx.
  • a video of Peter Frampton performing with guitar & talk box (the device is used from around 5:40 in the video):
  • a picture of Peter Frampton's talk box, by Carl Lender:
Talk Box
  • drawings on the blackboard, to remind students about formants, resonances of the vocal track, voiced and un-voiced sounds, vocal folds, guitar strings, and more.

Vocoder

Going from the talk box to the vocoder, it's going from real-world formants to modeled ones, where the resonances are not made by a human's vocal tract, but thanks to electronic resonator circuits. The Moog vocoder is perfect as a teaching support. My sources include:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Max for Live: Extreme Time Stretching with Spectral Stretch

Image
There are many ways to achieve audio time stretching without transposition . Some time-based methods build on Pierre Schaefer 's Phonogène . Another approach consists in processing the sound in spectral domain, using a phase vocoder . In this case, the audio samples are converted to spectral data through a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Then, even if we focus on extreme time stretching, the details of the phase vocoder implementation have important consequences on the sound quality and the tool's flexibility for live usage. Before introducing the Max for Live device Spectral Stretch, let's have a look at a selection of four possible algorithms: Paulstretch Max Live Phase Vocoder Interpolation between recorded spectra Stochastic Re-synthesis from a recorded sonogram Paulstretch Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch , also known as Paulstretch , is an algorithm designed by Paul Nasca for extreme time stretching. You might have heard one application already: to this date,
Read more

GroundSwell 2020 Emerging Composers Competition

Image
Groundswell is a wonderful organization dedicated to the development of new music in Winnipeg and the Province of Manitoba, Canada. I've been invited to serve as a member of the committee for their first electroacoustic music competition, along with composer Margaret Schedel and composer William Brunson . It's been a fun and quite interesting adventure. We listened to more than two dozen compositions. I wish we could have included more than 5 finalists: there were a number of atypical nice compositions. To listen, head to the competition page . You'll find links to the finalists' music.
Read more

A Free Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter

Image
When I discovered electronic music during the Centre Acanthes 2000/Ircam , my favorite topic was real time sound processing in frequency domain. Hans Tutschku taught the wonders of AudioSculpt in Avignon, before Benjamin Thigpen taught Max/MSP in Helsinki. Now, the Computer Music Journal just published an article I wrote about spectral sound processing in real time and performance time ( whereas real-time treatments are applied on a live sound stream, performance-time treatments are transformations of sound files that are generated during a performance ). If you are interested in graphical sound synthesis, phase vocoder , and sonograms (or spectrograms) , I hope you will enjoy this tutorial. The great news is that you can download the article for free on the page of the Computer Music Journal, Issue 32, Volume 3 . Max/MSP/Jitter patches You can readily apply the described techniques in the development environment Max/MSP/Jitter . For a hands-on approach, make sure you download t
Read more