Hi all:

I just got a very "Intergalactic" vocal sound today.  I used the fog
opcode to process a sample (stored in a table).  By setting the duration
of the sinusoid burst (kdur) to a size that is close to the size of 2
periods of the tone to be processed, you retain the formants of the
original sample, but with the pitch determined by the impulses that
trigger the bursts (xdens, or xfund in fof/fof2).  This allows you to
have independent control over duration of the sound, pitch of the sound,
and the overall pitch of the formants.  

Mind you, using such a simple implementation of pitch-synchronous
granular synthesis isn't perfect - without tweaking the sound, the
results are awfully robotic.  In fact, they sound IDENTICAL to
"Intergalactic." Not quite as ringy as comb filtering, but with some of
that quality.  The main thing that makes it sound robotic is that the
consonants have the same pitched quality as the vowels, which is not the
sound I want, but is very nice and robotic.  My guess is that the
Beastie Boys used some sort of "formant-preserving" pitch shifting plug
in, and tweaked it out so that it didn't track the original pitch, but
instead only produced one pitch.  It sounds identical, I tell ya.

Sean Costello


Kevin Gallagher wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, rasmus ekman wrote:

> > The vocal effect in Beastie Boys' song Intergalactic is
> > made with very short delay. Going on a comment somewhere on
> > Usenet I got something fairly similar with the following settings:
> > Around 95% feedback, and switch between say 10 and 12.5 msec
> > delay time to get the two different pitches (or perhaps
> > 8.5 / 11 msec; only heard the song 1-2 times, so not sure about
> > the delay time).
> > There's probably more to it, but this seems a basic part of the effect.
> >
> >       re
> >
> You mean comb filtering?  Comb-filtering gets the same basic effect and
> it's pretty simple to do in csound (comb opcode).  I guess comb filtering