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Monday, 25 April 2005
Morphing between vocal samples ::
On The Katia Labeque Band’s Unspoken, Dave Maric occasionally uses something that sounds like a vocal synthesizer. The voice morphs between vowels with a few consonants here and there. In the car on the way to San Francisco today I thought of a way to achieve a similar kind of effect in Reaktor; I just tried it and it works pretty well.
The starting points are the GrainStates SP factory instrument, and a vocal sample containing a few different timbres. I found that a short phrase worked well. First, import the sample into GrainStates, and with the “Man” button pressed (this selects scenes manually instead of via a sequence), set up the 8 scenes to play different interesting parts of the sample. You may find, for reasons that will be clear when you play with it, that you prefer that the 8 scenes progress in order through the sample.
To make GrainStates behave like a keyboard instrument, in the MIDI section, enable “m-ta” (MIDI retrigger) and “m TP” (MIDI transpose), and enable the envelope. Then set up the “selS” (select scene) knob to receive MIDI input (like the mod wheel). At this point, GrainStates is mostly doing what we want, playing different slices of the sample, triggered and transposed according to the MIDI keys played.
But when the “selS” knob is at a non-integral value like 4.5, GrainStates plays something halfway in between scenes 4 and 5, which might not be what you want. So I made this macro for a knob that will snap—or glide—toward an integral value, at a rate you choose:
Here, “Scene” is a knob with a value from 1 to 8. The Quantize module puts out the nearest integer and the difference between the knob value and that integer. If the error is non-zero, then a decay envelope with the amplitude of the error is triggered. The envelope’s decay time is controlled with a “glide” knob. The effect is that as you move the scene knob, you go through some of those places between the scenes, but when you stop moving the knob, the raw knob value eventually reaches the quantized value and you land in one of the prepared scenes.
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