Spoken Pads

One of the interesting things about speech is that you can reverse-engineer it to get the frequency response of the human vocal tract – the throat, mouth, lips, nose, teeth, tongue, etc. You can then manipulate that spectrum to extract the main ‘pitched’ part (the ‘musical’ bit), plus everything else (noise, harmonics, stray frequencies… – all the ‘interesting’ stuff!). These two parts can then be mixed to give different blends between ‘pitched’ and ‘noisy’ – it’s a primitive synthesis technique, but it is easy to use, and can be very effective.

‘Spoken Pads’ started out with several minutes of plain ordinary talking (not singing!), and ended up with Pitch P and Noise N parts, selectable via the two rows of ‘mic’ sliders. You can mis-match the parts if you want to… All exploration is encouraged! The Pitch row also has two different octave sine waves (Ss) if you want a stronger sense of pitch. The Noise row also has two resonances (Xx) that can emphasize or augment the tube-like characteristics of the human vocal tract.

‘Spoken Padz’ – note the ‘z’ – puts detune deep into the parts, rather than just putting a chorus on the output. This sounds a lot more synthetic in timbre.

Sound-wise, Spoken Pads/Padz sits somewhere between a vocal pad and a synthetic pad sound – the ‘mic’ sliders provide a lot of variation in spectral content, including some where the harmonics are very strong, which can make the pitch a little ‘nebulous’… Using the ADSR envelope controls, you can move outside of the slow AR ‘pad’ envelope shape and go percussive, if you wish.

MIDI Controllers

1 ‘Modulation Wheel’ controls the Low-pass Filter Cut-off Frequency Tone

11 ‘Expression’ controls the output volume

19 ‘General Purpose 4’ controls the Reverb Wet/Dry mix