Voder (Bell), Vocoder (Bell) and musical Vocoder

Plugins & Modules
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While working on Vocoders, I discovered that they were from an invention by a Bell engineer (Homer Dudley) in 1939, and improved during the Second World War.

After studying and trying to understand its principles, I tried to implement them in VCV Rack, not without difficulty! Once understood, the principles are “fairly easily implemented”; on the other hand, the settings are relatively triky and not easy to have nice behavior;o)

So, I made a first video (Fr) on the Voder of the engineer Homer Dudley (Bell), based on the concept of formants.

Then several videos on his Vocoder (still from Homer Dudley, Bell). I discuss the principles, and the implementations that I have done in VCV Rack (negative, positive synthesis approach, etc.)

Finally, a video on the principles of musical Vocoder, as we usually hear and see them, implemented also with VCV Rack.

Videos come with a VCV Rack Patch and a synoptic I created too; I use them as a presentation support.

Here is the Playlist about that on my YouTube channel:

Links on patches and Synoptics are in the video descriptions.

I’ll work and publish different improvements :

  • Central interface with Mindmeld Patch master collection.
  • Extra features for the musical vocoder.
  • Video with typical examples.

You can use of course the automatic translation provided by YouTube!

Alain (Synthé Buel)

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Interesting, I’ll try to watch that when I get a minute. Vocoders are basically a load of bandpass filters aren’t they? VCV Spectra is a great option if you don’t mind buying premium modules, but it’s always good to patch from scratch as a learning process.

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Thank you for your message! And do agree with you for the learning process.

In this case, i didnt have any idea about how to create a vocoder. I red lot of papers (presentation, research papers…), and tried different approaches until having some interesting results. It was very interesting doing like that!

The first clues came when reading the publication from Bell. Indeed, we use several bank filters, depinding also on the stratefy to recreate a sound. That’s at this stage of the process where I discovered what I named « positive and substractive » synthesis.

I created a synopsis in PDF file for the two strategies (link in the description).

If you have any question, it would be a pleasure to try to answer :smiley:

Alain.