Sonic Charge Bitspeek RE User Manual

Page 11

TalkingDrums

This time we are feeding drums
into

EXT IN

to filter them with the

formants of the audio that is en-
tering

AUDIO IN

. With the default

Combinator settings, the

FRAME

RATE

is set to

SYNC

on 16th

notes, producing a sample-and-
hold like quality. Subtle reverb and
compression is applied before
feeding the signal to

Bitspeek

NoiseWash

Here is an interesting concept.
The Combinator audio input is
split with a Spider and fed both to

AUDIO IN

and

EXT IN

, thus

Bit-

speek

will apply the formants of

the source audio onto itself. The
net effect is that spectral peaks
will be boosted and the noise floor
will be attenuated, similar to how
spectral gating in noise reduction
algorithms work. A compressor
keeps the output level in check.

SpeekBox (midi)

The final Combinator patch needs
to be played with midi. It attempts
to emulate a "talkbox" effect by
sending a SubTractor to

EXT IN

We disregard the volume and the
pitch of the speech signal

(going

to AUDIO IN)

. We are just after the

glorious formants.

To avoid undesirable glitches
when the speech signal dips low,
a noise gate contraption has been
devised using Thor and CV from
an MClass Compressor. All it ba-
sically does is mute the speech
signal when it drops below a certain threshold.

Bitspeek

will not attempt to extract

formants on silent input, thus effectively freezing the last audible content.

So, if you set the "Threshold" knob on the Combinator to an appropriate level you
should be able to catch your breath without interrupting audio while you crank out
those funky talkbox leads.