Soundwave

I am a confirmed geek... this much all of my friends know. This geekocity is due in large part because of my continued (as in, 20 years and counting) fascination with a certain brand of sentient robots.

If the title of this entry means nothing to you beyond its possible acoustic definition, read no further. However, if the word "Soundwave" conjures images of the audio-cassette-ejecting, monotone-speaking, energon-cube-producing lieutenant of a certain evil group of robots, you just might get as excited about this as I did.

In short, I figured out how they made Soundwave sound the way he did in the old 80's cartoon.

I've had the good opportunity in my life to work with several high-grade, professional effects processors, and as I would be tinkering with them, I'd get the idea to try and replicate that very unique sound that Sunbow studios were able to create for Soundwave. I never even came close. It was never something that I was able to reverse engineer using any one single effect.

Which is the point. They didn't create his voice by any one effect (as they did with the other characters). It was a combination of things. At least, it was a combination of things that I've been able to put together that comes close to the Soundwave effect.

You need a couple of pieces of software, all freely available, to start. (I'm guessing that you could get closer to the actual effect than I did with some professional tools, but my budget for this project was 0¢, so this was the recipe I came up with.)

Audacity: Even if you're not interested in recreating Soundwave, this is about as useful an audio-editing tool as you can get. It has a whole series of built-in functions (reverb, pitch control, etc.), along with a framework to use VST plugins (there's not a whole lot of oomph to that part of Audacity yet, but the potential is alluring). This software operates much the same was as Sound Sculptor II did on the Mac (which I used to the exclusion of all else when Mac was my main platform). (Coincidentally, if you're using an old 68k or "G2" Power Macintosh (like my old 4400), Sound Sculptor II runs just fine. It hasn't been updated (read: "Pantherized" or "Carbonized") in three years, which is a good sign for you Classic environment enthusiasts out there.)

Anvil Studio: This is largely a MIDI-instruction generator in which you can compose music and send it to a MIDI synthesizer or some other like-enabled contraption. You'll want to use this to generate a couple of chords (i.e., one major and a related minor) that will correspond to the modulation of Soundwave's phraseology.

Vocoder: This is where the magic happens. A vocoder, as I'm lead to understand it, was an invention out of the 70's, when artists wanted to make their - for instance - guitar "speak". They'd record a vocal (called a modulator) on one track, record some kind of tone with their guitar as a carrier track, then combine the two in a many-thousands-of-dollars device called a vocoder. With this device, artists could combine the cadences of speech with the sound of pretty much whatever instrument they could imagine.

This all works best if you're able to record your voice with a microphone attached to your computer.

Get these programs installed and fool around with them a bit, and I'll write up the rest of the tutorial in the next few days.