Sonic Charge has spent the last few years gathering well-deserved plaudits for developing a range of musically interesting tools. Its product list includes Synplant, the synth which "grows" sounds from core cells, and µTonic (pronounced MicroTonic), which is an impressive sounding electronic drum machine. The latest plug-in to be added to their product list is Bitspeek, which is principally a voice processor allowing you to create talking robot effects. Before you dismiss this as a gimmick, however, it's important to point out that there's much more here than meets the eye.
Despite a simple interface, Bitspeek does something rather clever. When I first heard about it, I assumed it would be a standalone application which, a bit like the Vox3000 application for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, would let you type in a phrase and then hear it played back through a crunchy voice synthesizer. This isn't the case at all, as Bitspeek has no standalone mode and simply opens as a mono plug-in in any compatible software host. This means that it can process any audio you feed it through your host sequencer, immediately lifting the "voice only" restriction of other talking synth applications.
So, how does it work? Well, Bitspeek uses a technology called a "real-time pitch-excited linear prediction codec," which is a posh way of saying that its algorithms analyse incoming audio and break it down into key elements such as a basic oscillator, noise, filtering and formant information. You can then play with these elements separately to produce anything from Speak and Spell-like robot voices, pitch-shifting effects, bit reduction tricks, noisy, mashed up vocals, low frequency versions of sounds which bear little resemblance to the original input audio or all of the above simultaneously.
The lower half of Bitspeek's GUI provides access to manipulation parameters with four sliders/switches and four rotary dials below. The first slider selects sample rate for the output signal with four choices—44, 22, 11 or 8kHz. Next to that is the Frame Rate slider, which determines how "accurate" a snapshot of the sound is captured each time it's analysed. The slider goes from right (Full) to left (Stop) and the further left you go, the more the original voice is lost, replaced by a crunchy synth melody which tracks the intonation of the input signal, reminding me of some classic Daft Punk sounds. You can either leave the performance of the Frame Rate free or Sync it to tempo using the switch to the right, which freezes tracking at the quantise speed of your choice.
The Pitch dial produces real-time transposition of the output signal with +/-36 semitones (3 octaves) of pitch-shift available. Holding shift while pitch-shifting lets you tune to gaps between semi-tones which is useful due to the frequent unpredictability of the analysis stage. The Tracking dial lets you decide how you want to deal with the detected pitch of a sound. Leaving the dial at its central position of 100% tracks the original pitch, while turning it hard left gives a robotic, "fixed pitch" result. 200%, the hard-right position, widens pitch beyond its original range. Bitspeek features a second oscillator which can be used to blend in a Detune effect via the dial of the same name but rather than restricting you to narrow, chorus-like effects, this oscillator can stretch to +/-1200 cents, providing a full octave of detune.
Lastly, the Noise generation stage allows you to reduce or enhance the noise component of any detected sound. This is a way to clean or dirty up your audio, with this dial capable of removing all consonants from your input signal at minimum setting or producing an exaggerated whisper effect when cranked to maximum.
The final control within Bitspeek is perhaps its most impressive. If your host supports MIDI input to audio plug-ins, you can feed a MIDI signal into Bitspeek which forces it to play your choice of note at any given time. This obviously completes its job as a pitched speaking synthesizer, but it's fair to say that even if your host DAW doesn't permit this, Bitspeek has a lot to offer. For instance, I was amazed that I could turn a spoken phrase into a crunchy, pounding electro bassline simply by reducing sampling frequency, sync'ing the Tracking rate and selecting my pitch of choice. Bitspeek also worked well placed on an auxiliary channel after a delay to produce fixed note echoes behind a lead vocal, an ethereal effect which worked brilliantly.
What's clear is that whether you use it just as a voice synthesizer or as a processor for any mono input signal, Bitspeek can do wonderful, wild and potentially unpredictable things. From ResidentAdvisor.net
