Do these two effects exist?

[inverseroom]

1) an analog auto-tune. It would be awkward and imprecise, of course, but that would be the point. It would ideally be a module for a modular synth, and as you played portamento through it it would clumsily snap to the notes in a particular scale. Actually, just typing this, I am thinking it's impossible. But wouldn't that sound cool?

2) a digital plugin that lets you do morphing instead of crossfades...that is, one sound, say a voice, actually transforms into another, say a french horn, instead of one fading into the other.

Anyone?

[dave watkins]

1) antares does make a rack mount autotune module, i've never used it (i've only used the plugin version but never on vocals, only on turkeys), but it does exist, check ebay i guess. you might even be able to run live audio through the plugin version in real time and do some crazy stuff, but you'd probably have to have a pretty powerful machine to not end up with latency. but i haven't tried it myself so i can't really speak to this being awesome or a complete waste of time.

2) you'd still probably have to do some creative editing and automation, and probably would have to still do some crossfadeing, but this kind of thing should be possible in the plugin world. check out izotope's spectron, it actually has a function called "morph" that allows you to blend you existing track with a sample. it's kind of somewhere between and beyond convolution reverb and a vocoder. you end up with the structural or rhythmic qualities of you original track with the tonal characteristics of whatever sample you use. it's kind of hard to explain. plus spectron is just a pretty bizzare and flexible plugin for doing all kinds of weird sound treatment, i believe they free demo's downloadable on their website. it's worth at least checking it out.

hope that helps. happy weird sound getting!

[BenjaminWells]

For morphing, I discovered symbolicsound.com. I've never tried it. It's pretty expensive hardware that runs this software called Kyma. But it can do this:
http://www.symbolicsound.com/mp3/morphs.mp3

It's built for sound designers and looks like a lot of fun. Anyone have this system?

[Stevil]

one sound, say a voice, actually transforms into another...
Anyone?

the RBC Voice Tweaker is an interesting variation on the pitch correction/harmonizer plugin. it's got "maleify" & "womanize" settings, so feminine voices sound masculine & vise versa, without going so far into chipmunk, cher or 'shout at the devil' territory.
http://www.sonicspot.com/rbcvoicetweake ... eaker.html

vocoders are another option but they tend to always sound like vocoders.
i'm surprised there hasnt been more innovation in this area of signal processing, guess everybody is too busy trying to make emulations of "vintage" gear.


...thanks for the "Izotope Spectron" tip, i'll check that one out.

[inverseroom]

As will I.

I realize there are many kinds of digital autotune, but i was specifically referring to the possibility of an inevitably limited analog approximation of it, for creative sound mangling purposes.

[dave watkins]

i was specifically referring to the possibility of an inevitably limited analog approximation of it, for creative sound mangling purposes.

ah well i'm kind of lost on whether or not something like that exists than, though i do have to say that auto tune when cranked to it's extremes and put on things other than vocals can sound quite sloppy and mangled... but yeah as far as some analog circuitry, i've got nothing.

also i got kind of stoked on the idea of morphing so i took a clip of select instruments from a demo of one of my songs and went to town to see if i could quickly use spectron to do something interesting in that regard. it's kind of cool but it think it may still sound too reliant on fades, but of course i'm going from something with a lot of transient peaks to something that's more tame and constant. so i would imagine doing this same kind of thing to go from vocals to a french horn would be a bit more subtle and weird, and not sound quite so much like some kind of techno thing that i don't think i would actually go and add into my song.

the clip contains the following:

bowed psaltery ensemble

drums

drums using the bowed psaltery as the impulse morphing file in spectron

all three mixed to make it kinda sound like the drums turn into the bowed psaltery ensemble.

morph.mp3 - 1.57MB

and the full original song just for comparison sake if you like:

whiskey butter sauce.mp3 - 2.88MB

[inverseroom]

Yeah, you're getting somewhere there, but you're right, it still just kinda sounds like the ensemble is being triggered by the transients on the drums, and then it's all getting crossfaded. Definitely a cool effect though!

[RefD]

maybe high band count vocoding using two different non-synth sources for both the carrier and the modulator signals?

thinking out loud here.

[JGriffin]

Kyma is an awesome tool but yeah, a little pricey.

[trodden]

but yeah, a little pricey.

unlike inverse's mom.

[The Scum]

an analog auto-tune.

I've seen it done manually before, using an electronic tuner and an H3000. It got really sophisticated when they hooked up a MIDI controller, and were using the pitch bend lever to control the H3000.

But come to think of it, that rig could probably be automated - use a chromatic tuner to attempt to discern semitone-wide bins, then use the needle or LED position on the tuner to generate a "shift amount" parameter for the pitch shifter.

But since truly analog pitch shifting is a rare bird, and the tuner itself probably has a digital heart, it's all moot anyways.

[JGriffin]

an analog auto-tune.

I've seen it done manually before, using an electronic tuner and an H3000. It got really sophisticated when they hooked up a MIDI controller, and were using the pitch bend lever to control the H3000.

Back in the early 1990s when a radio spot would come in over 30 seconds (or, y'know, 60) and we needed to get it in time, we'd speed up the tape and run it through a Lexicon pitch-shifter, a 480L if I recall right, to bring it back to the right pitch. Our somewhat-less-than-tech-savvy clients came to know this technique as "lexiconning" the spot. Anyway.

[Seamonster]

None of the following are exactly what you're looking for in No. 2, but might provide ideas for further research.

Back in Mac OS 9 there was an app that would take two audio files and morph one to the other. It rendered offline, so you had to tweak, render, listen, tweak, re-render... It may have employed some variety of convolution. I only played with it a few times and don't recall its name (sorry!). But it's out there, and was possibly updated to OS X.

The Lexicon Vortex will morph from one patch to another ? not just a crossfade, but a morphing of your chosen parameters. It will do this using a control pedal. I haven't used mine in a while, but I seem to recall that the morph can also be set to take X amount of time when just *switching* from setting A to setting B or back (for which footswitches can be used).

In the early 90's Yamaha implemented what they called "Vector Control," on their SY series synths (SY22, SY35, S77). (Possibly other manufacturers did something similar. Korg?) Using a built-in joystick you could swirl around among different user-settable MIDI parameters. It wasn't an audio morph, but MIDI. Maybe its coolest feature was that you could record your joystick moves to store patches incorporating the sonic motion. I always thought it would be fun to map the joystick controller to a controller window in Digital Performer to morph MIDI data from other instruments; but I never tried it, as MIDI has become less and less interesting to me over the years. That said, I just bought an SY35 for $30 and gave my SY22 to a friend (they're basically the same unit, though the 35 has 16-bit sounds vs. the 12-bit sounds of the 22.)

So buy a cheap Yammy synth, run it through a Vortex, mangle the results in that mystery OS 9 software, and get back to us ? if your brain is not jello by then.

[scntfc]

Back in Mac OS 9 there was an app that would take two audio files and morph one to the other. It rendered offline, so you had to tweak, render, listen, tweak, re-render... It may have employed some variety of convolution. I only played with it a few times and don't recall its name (sorry!). But it's out there, and was possibly updated to OS X.

probably soundhack.

another to check out is camel audio's alchemy. it can do some interesting resynthesis tricks...all dependent on analyzing the source material and translating it into adjustable parameters.

and re: analog autotune...anything analog would still have to jump through the same hoops as digital: the source signal has to be analyzed and broken down into digestible chunks that can then be adjusted...the smaller the chunks the more precise the adjustments you can make. changing pitch is easy enough (e.g. a bucket brigade delay: high feedback + short delay time and you can continuously adjust the pitch of the input), "realism" and resolving to specific pitch is another matter entirely, and offhand i can't think of a way it could be done analog.

btw this song by schneider tm has some good examples of some of this stuff. the main vocal sounds like simple vocoder, but at 2:10 he does some cool stuff with mixing voice and what sounds like guitar strings...no idea what he used, but it could be the symbolic sound stuff.

[joel hamilton]

Analog autotune= vocoder variants.

A formant filter coupled with a carrier and modulator.

You could do this sort of thing with a vocoder, using the backing vocal as the carrier and the main vocal as the modulator. You get the formants of the main vocal applied to the backing vocal. I have done it to tighten up multiple vocals so they all "open and close" together. Can be transparent or heavy handed depending on the carrier used with the vocal track. ..because the formant is the only aspect of the vocal being "measured", rather than the incoming pitch/note/frequency, it requires you playing the melody into midi or with an analog sequence to get note information when not using a pitched instrument as the carrier.

The combination of the electro harmonix voice box and a modular synth is prety deadly. I am looking for someone that can give me a CV out from my voice box.....