prototypical vocal synth

This assignment is designed to give you practice with qlists and delay lines. There's no relationship between the two, it's just what's happening in the course right now. The assignment is to use a recirculating comb filter and a qlist-based sequencer to make our tedious radio announcer sing his phrase "soft and relaxing". The melody I chose was the playground chant sometimes known as "I'm the king of the castle" but you're free to choose your own if you can think of something more interesting.

To impose your own pitch on the sound of the recorded voice, send it through a recirculating comb filter (a delay loop with a short delay time tuned to the desired period). Here's how to do it:

• Make a sampler, which could be simply based on "tabplay", that plays from a wavetable with the familiar "voice.wav" sample. The sample should be read with a "loadbang" message using the soundfiler object, and should be long enough to hold the whole sample (hint: the soundfiler object can be directed to resize the wavetable to fit the sample you're loading). There should be a way to control the start location in the wavetable, and the duration of the output (playback time), controlling the output amplitude with a line~ and using the usual de-clicking strategy.
• Make a recirculating delay line with delwrite~ and delread4~ (use the interpolating delread4~ object, not the non-interpolating delread~, to get the most accurate control over delay length that you can - this will affect pitch accuracy later). The recirculation gain can be set to 0.9. The delay length should be set to 1000 divided by the desired resonant pitch in Hz.
• Set up a control structure as follows. Make a receive name ("note" would be fine) unpacked into three parameters: wavetable onset, playback time, and resonant pitch (as a MIDI number) for the comb filter. So that you can test it, also make a setup that packs the output of three number boxes into a message to the same receive, so that changing any of the three number boxes causes a new "note" to come out.
• Make a qlist object with a "bang" (button) to start it. A message in the qlist like "note 1000 200 60" should then go to the receive you built in the previous step and make an audible note when you start it via "bang".
• Make the sequence. Mine consisted of the pitches 60, 57, 62, 60, 57. The first one cam out immediately and the succeeding ones with delays of 1, 2/3, 1/3, and 1 "beat" respectively (I used 600, 400, 200, 600, but then ended up setting the tempo (a message to the qlist object) to 1.1 or 1.2 to speed things up slightly).

IMPORTANT: contrarry to something I said in class last week, the qlist object does NOT save its contents in the containint patch - instead, it's best to use "write" and "read" messages to the qlist object to save its sequence between sessions, and make it "read" the file with a loadbang.

Your successful patch should sound something like this (but not necessarily that exact melody).

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