Talking Guitar

Inventor

I'm just beginning to get my guitar to talk. Attached is a program that synthesizes the vocal tract. It listens to the microphone for guitar input, then wah-filters it in x and y dimensions under mouse control. I pluck the low E string and move the mouse and it says "do you", just like Peter Frampton did with a voice box when he played "do you feel like i do".

For now I'm limited to the "d" consonant and o, u, ou type vowels, but I hope to expand it once the accelerometer is on the guitar. I think a muffled strum might make a good "t" or "th" sound. Also the vocal formants include "i" and "oi" vowels when accessed properly.

In addition, I am using wah to learn but dual band-pass is the correct model, perhaps I will try that next.

Anyway, if you don't have a guitar, an amp, and ChucK set up to play the attached source code, then just listen to the attached mp3. If you listen creatively, some of the attempts really sound like "do you"! Cheers!

Guitar_Mouse1.mp3

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"Do you" spoken by the guitar!

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Guitar_Mouse1.ck

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The source code for the guitar mouse wah program

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Guitar_Mouse1.ck

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Kassen · Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 4:22 am Post subject:

Very nice indeed!

Inventor · Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 5:42 pm Post subject:

Inventor · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 2:25 am Post subject:

I just spent a whole lot of time going nowhere fast with this whole talking guitar thing. I decided the mouse was hard to use while plucking the guitar, so I tried to automate the process of switching between different spots on the vocal formants chart. Tried everything, got nowhere. Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you.

Inventor · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:23 am Post subject:

Looks like I spoke too soon. After hours and hours of failure I decided to google vocal chord frequencies. A human male has a vocal chord fundamental frequency of about 125 Hz (200 for females, 300 for children). This turns out on my handy frequency chart to be string 5, fret 2. So I reasoned that I should play that note and enhance the harmonics somehow.

Well, what have we been playing with recently but comb filters, which have a gain of about 10 when their feedback gain is set to 0.9, so 10x on all harmonics should help. I sent that into the parallel vocal chord formants and had the computer switch from vowel to vowel and got the attached audio sample. Source code is attached as well.

When you listen, first there are two seconds of silence and then "oo ou ee ae i oo", which models Peter Frampton's "Do you feel like I do?" that he did with a talk box. The example occurs three times. It's still not as good as his version (I'm playing it on iTunes now), but it's definitely some good progress. There are some clicks and pops in the recording due to the sudden switching of the band pass filters as well. Yay, I did it (almost)!

Peter_Frampton4.mp3

Description:

Peter Frampton audio file

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Peter_Frampton4.ck

Description:

Peter Frampton source code

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Peter_Frampton4.ck

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Inventor · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 6:46 am Post subject:

I've been playing with the talking guitar program some more this morning. I thought it might sound better if I used a different pitch for the fundamental of each word. The pitches are (low, medium, high, medium, high, low) to correspond with the words (Do you feel like I do). The attached audio sample is the result, a bit awkward as my fingering is poor being a guitar newbie, but try to imagine it done properly. Which is better, the previous example or this new one?

p.s. I had to cook up a whole complex 12-comb filter with auto normalizer to get it to work, too. What fun!

Peter_Frampton5.mp3

Description:

New version with pitch change for each word

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Inventor · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 6:51 am Post subject:

I got tired of having to time my playing according to the computer's time delay for each word, so I created a shred that auto-detects the note being played and applies a corresponding vowel to it. In this way whenever you pluck a string you get a corresponding vowel sound, so the pitch and the word go together.

This is nice because it is kind of automatically synced to the guitar playing so that the performer is free to make whatever sentences are desired from the vowels. The source code an an audio sample are attached.

Peter_Frampton8.mp3

Description:

Do you feel like I do under guitar strumming control, occurs twice

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Peter_Frampton8.ck

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Source code for this effect

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Peter_Frampton8.ck

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Inventor · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:38 pm Post subject:

I reallized that the human throat and mouth muscles shape the sound in a gradual fashion, not suddenly with jumping motions. This led me to imagine that if I added smooth sweeping to the code, the sounds would be improved. And boy are they!

Have a listen to the attached *.mp3 file. It has "do you feel like I do" three times, done with the new code. Not all of the words are quite recognizable, but some of them are pretty good! Progress!

Peter_Frampton11.mp3

Description:

Latest and greatest, with smoothly changing vowel sounds.

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