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To be used with Emy or Terminal
Robovox was inspired by the Patent “System for and method of synthesizing singing in real-time” filed on 03.05.90 by Florian Schneider, Gert Joachim Ott, and Gert Jalass.
It describes a musical instrument that can produce a speech and sing in real-time via MIDI controls.
At the heart of the instrument, lives a magical speech synthesizer chip: the Votrax SC-02 invented by Richard T. Gagnon.
The Votrax SC-02 chip can generate speech by stringing phoneme together. It is noteworthy that specifics phonemes for French and German can also be produced …
The Votrax SC-02 contains registers that allow software control of the speech rate, pitch, pitch movement rate, amplitude, articulation rate, vocal tract filter, and of course phoneme selection.
Most of these functions are implemented in the MIDI control software.
In Robovox, we also implemented an undocumented function of the chip: the internal audio carrier can be replaced by an external one to produce vocoder-like effects. The result is simply amazing. You can also use this feature as an effect to apply to the carrier !
Specifications
Hardware
– Add-on board to fit on Emy or Terminal via the MikroBUS port
– Host the vintage SC-02 Votrax speech chip
– Audio carrier input for vocoder like effect
– Midi controls
– MIDI note ON note OFF mapped to the SC02’s phonemes
– Velocity
– Pitch (coarse control by clocking the chip)
– CC2 Note Pitch (fine control using the chip inflection/pitch register)
– Mod Wheel mapped to filter
– CC 64 sustain ON/OFF to choose between the internal and external carrier