For Project 1 I wanted to do something similar to the speaking piano on YouTube by deconstructing and reconstructing speech. In particular, I thought it would be interesting to deconstruct speech in different languages since different languages just sound so fundamentally different. I found a Max object that would do most of the technical work for this and went ahead and tried it out on different vowel sounds and audio clips of singing/speech, using different types of waves for the reconstruction (sine, triangle, square, sawtooth).

Then I loaded them all up in Audacity, time stretched some of them, and pieced together a short clip that includes some of the outputted audio:

My goal here wasn’t to reconstruct the speech into something comprehensible, but rather to explore the sinusoidal makeup of speech.

Main patch:

Child Patch 1:

Child Patch 2: