real time vocoder?

[Timothy Miller]

Greetings,

Me and my wife and my two teenage boys are having a little fun singing
a capella four part harmony.

Trouble is, we are three tenors and a soprano. We sound like the
Minnie Mouse clone war. (Episode XXIX of the Star Wars saga coming to
a theater near you, not at all soon.)

We need a bass.

I've looked at the Roland Boss VT-1. It'll transpose your voice up or
down, as desired, in real time. Plug in a mic and a small powered
speaker, transpose down an octave, and you've got a bass.

That's what a vocoder does, basically

The VT-1 is expensive, and they don't turn up on eBay too often.

I began to wonder if there is an application that will run on my
400 MHZ G3 (Macintosh) laptop that will do the same thing.

Is there? (I don't want to buy a sound card, so it'll have to be
native. No way to put a sound card into my laptop anyway.

It's possible I already own such an app.

I have Bias Peak LE, SonicWorx Artist and Amadeus. They have vocoders
that work great, but as far as I know they transpose input that has
already been recorded to the hard disk. And recording to the hard disk
is the slow link in the chain. Can any of these apps be configured to
transpose in real time without recording?

Obviously, I don't know a lot about this stuff.

Thanks in advance,


Tim Miller

[John ffitch]

A Csound program should do what you ask on your kit. Beware of the
twin problems of latency and formants.
==John ff

[Timothy Miller]

Post by John ffitch
A Csound program should do what you ask on your kit. Beware of the
twin problems of latency and formants.
==John ff

I looked at the Csound site. It looks like they sell sound/music
hardware, such as sound boards, or outboard devices.

I'm looking for a software-only solution that will run on my machine.
I'm pretty sure my machine is fast enough. I don't need a real high
sampling rate, and it's only one channel -- a microphone.

Maybe I misunderstood something about Csound.

Otherwise, other suggestions?


Cheers,



Tim Miller

[j***@codemist.co.uk]

Post by John ffitch
A Csound program should do what you ask on your kit. Beware of the
twin problems of latency and formants.
==John ff

Timothy> I looked at the Csound site. It looks like they sell sound/music
Timothy> hardware, such as sound boards, or outboard devices.

No; you have been misled to a Korean(?) organisation that uses the
name and is not related. Try www.csounds.com or www.csound.org

Or look on sourceforge

Timothy> I'm looking for a software-only solution that will run on my machine.
Timothy> I'm pretty sure my machine is fast enough. I don't need a real high
Timothy> sampling rate, and it's only one channel -- a microphone.

Csound is software only, running on most (all?) platforms. Not the
easiest language, but has a large range of things it can do.
Personally I use it for composition, as well as research into
performance, teaching students about DSP, and entertainment.

Timothy> Maybe I misunderstood something about Csound.

Yep!

Timothy> Otherwise, other suggestions?


I shoudl add that I am biased, being one of the main maintainers/
developers for the last 12 years

==John ffitch

[Timothy Miller]

***@codemist.co.uk wrote

--snip--

Post by j***@codemist.co.uk
Csound is software only, running on most (all?) platforms. Not the
easiest language, but has a large range of things it can do.
Personally I use it for composition, as well as research into
performance, teaching students about DSP, and entertainment.

Thanks a bunch, John.

So, Csound is like a music oriented scriptable application, or
something like that?

I'll go to their website, but if you want to pre-clue me a bit, that
might be helpful.

Cheers,


Tim

[Weston C]

Post by Timothy Miller
--snip--

Post by j***@codemist.co.uk
Csound is software only, running on most (all?) platforms. Not the
easiest language, but has a large range of things it can do.
Personally I use it for composition, as well as research into
performance, teaching students about DSP, and entertainment.

You may also want to look into SuperCollider
(http://www.audiosynth.com ), another application with many
similarities to CSound (though not based on the same syntax derived
from the Music V family of languages)...

[Note Jam]

Maybe download the new band in a box 2004 at www.pgmusic.com

They have both ibm and mac versions.
The program allows you to pitch shift a track to what you want, so I think you
could use it that way.

It also has the ability to harmonize a track, with 1 to 4 additional harmonizer
tracks created, depending on harmony settings selected. This is not live, you
record a track, and then process the track.

With it, you could create 4 part harmony tracks all by your-self.

Then you or your family members could replace any tracks they wanted to with
their own voice so this would be cool for those days when 1 or 2 of you want to
sing, and the other/others do not.

Its about $120-$140 with all the extras tossed in. Its a fantastic program
that will do a lot more than just function as an audio recorder/harmonizer,
such as compose a song according to chords you type in, or from scratch, etc.