At the start of this project, I wanted to build something like a vocoder that can change human voices into robot voices in real-time. I also wanted to implement the “luminance control” we learned in class to control the kind or the level of distortion of the robot voice. But then I realized that since I never have tried to change a human voice to a robot voice, I don’t really know how to do a decent job on that topic. Things like how do I treat the consonant, how do I treat the vowels, how to distort the human voice into different kinds of robot voices, and what exactly defines a robot voice was something that I struggled with.
So then I started my project by making the luminance control part of my project. And I tried to look at some YouTube videos, Max tutorials, and examples from build-in Max patches to see how a vocoder work. Then I used the framework of a build-in Max patcher (a bpatcher) to build some of the sound distortion functions in my patch. I also have successfully connected my luminance level detector to one of the sound distortion functions so that the luminance level controls the pitch of the distortion.
After these, I thought about ways to make my patch more interesting and interactive. I build a boomerang function in my Max patch with the help of tutorials from YouTube so that we are able to layer into one audio source over and over again to create music or even just something fun. So now my project is something that allows people to record sounds into one layer over and over again, and people may use it to produce some kind of goofy sounds/graceful music with the press of a space bar.
Here is a screenshot for my main patch:
Here is the patch in my google drive:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AQxTk3KJUArXPtQmaLf659QtU1iyne8x