One of the sounds requested for the videogame was voices for the characters similar to the ones in Animal Crossing which is called Animalese. Each letter corresponds to a different synthesised sound.
So to replicate something similar I took the approach of using formant synthesis, this method uses resonant bandpass filters to mimic the sound of human speech.
Mutable Instruments ‘Plaits’, is a great Eurorack module with different synthesis modes, one of them being formant synthesis. So I decided to record this module and with granular synthesis transpose the recording, spreading the grains and filtering.
This sort of replicates Animalese. I did different takes, and long recordings, to have lots to work with.
I also recorded my girlfriends voice and voices from the radio, and processing this with granular synthesis. Specifically with the module ‘Morphagene’, which is an amazing piece of equipment.
The idea was to use these sounds for a couple of levels in the videogame, since we didn’t actually end up doing this, and we use the trailer instead, we didn’t end up using these sounds. But now I have a huge folder filled with these funny sounds, maybe they will come in handy in the future.
I did some research to find other equipment that does formant synthesis, and I found the ‘Yamaha FS1R’, which sounds amazing.
The 1st of June, I went to Cafe OTO. Wade Matthews was performing using an extremely elaborate Max for Live patch, in which he was using a similar approach to this, using formant and granular synthesis, but he was controlling this which a weird looking touch sensitive pad. Really cool stuff.