Modular Synthesizer Speaking In An Alien Tongue (Richard Devine)

Modular Synthesizers: Synthesist and sound designer Richard Devine makes his modular synthesizer speak in an alien tongue, with the help of the The Harvestman’s Piston Honda Oscillator.

The Harvestman Piston Honda is a wavetable oscillator with variable interpolation resolution. Two ROMs are onboard, each containing 256 waveforms in 16 banks. An optional expansion board provides six more rom sockets for use with blacet/wiard-format waveform data. You can also use Wave256 software to write your own data.  Waves may be smoothly morphed or violently jumped in two dimensions. The degree of discontinuity these waveform changes is voltage controllable.

15 thoughts on “Modular Synthesizer Speaking In An Alien Tongue (Richard Devine)

  1. My BBC Micro could do that (better) in 1985 with a phoneme speech synthesis chip and a random number generator in three lines of BASIC. Give it another ten years, and somebody will have a fearsomely expensive synthesizer module singing, "Daisy, Daisy…".

  2. i don't think the aim was to get it to do proper speech, there are plenty of things that do that, just look at the post with the dancing HRP-4C. I'm guessing it's been loaded with lots of different vowel and consonent type sounds. pretty cool, imho!

  3. I like noise as much as anyone. But making noise with a modular is a lot like masturbating. You have fun but its not much fun for the rest of us to watch.

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