Here we go, my first post on this fresh blog.
Here is the result of an experiment that I did. The first chorus is with vocoder and the second without for comparison.
tobiah - even machinesThis is what I used to make the track. This not an absolute, other set-ups works as well but with different methods.
- OS X Snow Leopard (For speechsynthesis and OS)
- Ableton Live 8
- Chipsounds (For the C64 lead and Carrier on the Vocoder)
- MicroTonic (Drum synthesizer)
- Synplant (Pads and Bass)
In the Terminal application, write the following:
say “I am the robot”
This makes OS X’s synthesis to speak out loud, but if you add the following, it will write the audio to a file with the name you specify. (I used the file ending *.aac because it was the only format I got to work)
say -o “audiofile.aac” “I am the robot”
Now you can make short samples of synthesized speech that you can include in your music projects.
What I did after that was to import the speech into Audacity and convert it to AIFF format so that I could import it into Live 8. In Live 8 you have a function to stretch and beatmatch transients. So it doesn’t matter so much that the output from the OS X speech synthesis isn’t made for musicmaking.
A general tip about vocoders that I picked up from Kraftwerk, is that if you use an EQ on the voice (modulator) and add gain to the higher portion of the audio frequency range. You will get a much clearer sound.