Vocoder
The minichord has no microphone, but it takes in sound over USB, and its vocoder lets that sound shape the chords. Play one of these loops of speech into it, hold a chord, and the chord says the words.
Connect the minichord. The loops play without it too.
The voice
The voice in the vocoder's sixteen bands, 100 Hz to 8 kHz: each band of the chord is let through as loud as the voice is in it.
The minichord
- Hold a chord down: the vocoder needs a sound to shape, and words only come through while the chord is sounding.
- Change chord on the bar, with the next sentence. The bars above count them.
- The harp's plucks die away too fast to carry words, but strummed through a sentence they make textures.
How it works
The computer plays the loop to the minichord as if it were a speaker. Inside, the voice is split into sixteen bands from 100 Hz to 8 kHz, and its level in each one sets how much of the same band of the chord comes through. A vowel is a pattern of loud and quiet bands, so the chord takes on the vowel; the pattern changes from syllable to syllable, so the chord talks, at the chord's pitch rather than the speaker's. The hiss of s, t and sh sits above 5 kHz, and the consonants setting lets some of it through, so words can be made out.
The recordings were made in an anechoic room and keep everything up to 9 kHz, so the hiss is there for the consonants setting to use. Turn it to 0 to hear the vowels alone, and up to make the words plainer. The sentence being spoken is written under the bars: knowing the words makes them far easier to hear in the chord.
The settings are borrowed: leave the page, or press Give everything back, and the minichord is as it was. The vocoder needs the unofficial advanced firmware, version 34 or later, with USB audio on (any setting but 2).