Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation

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While reviewing my set for last night’s Ostraka performance, I noticed that using filtering followed by down-sampling produced a robotic vowel like sound applied to synth bass. It’s got a nice vintage vocoder or Speak & Spell graininess to it.

Finding this effect was really an accident, because I had been using this particular effect chain on my master track in this set for a while, but hadn’t stumbled across the settings that produced this sound until last night. Placing the filter before doing the the down-sampling is the key. It does not work the other way around.

Here’s a couple of minutes to illustrate how to apply the effect. I was making real-time adjustments to the frequency of the low pass filter, and the amount of down-sampling. Toward the end I upped the reverb to give it some tail.

Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation

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About John CS Keston

John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research. John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.

4 thoughts on “Speak & Spell Like Vowel Simulation”

  2. thanks! glad you like. to reproduce the effect, in ableton put an autofilter with a lowpass filter followed by bit reduction onto the track. crank up the Q, then modulate (or adjust manually) the frequency on the filter while turning up the down-sampling.

  4. i find that it’s best to do this with a simple square wave and automating the filter cuttoff slightly up and down after applying some bitt crusher of course, cubase’s bit crusher is the best i have come across.
    allot of dubstep producers are utilizing this sound effect in allot of songs as of lately and the best way to go about it is to use Massive!

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