Sonicware Ambient Ø Sample Manipulation Experiement - Speak Clearly....

video upload by ChrisLody

"I had a an hour or so free time this afternoon to do something experimental, messing with the Ambient 0's Noise layer for the purposes of sample manipulation.

I found the tape deck shown, a Genexxa CTR-96, in a charity shop recently and bought it immediately as it had a tape inside. That's always in 'insta-buy' scenario for me and it paid off. On the tape is the phrase you hear, 'You should speak clearly to get the best recognition accuracy, full stop'. The lady repeats this 3 time on the 3 getting slower and sounding more frustrated. There seem to be children making noise in the background so my best guess is she was a teacher and was trying out some 90s speech to text which wasn't working well (it didn't back then), but I'm not sure. The rest of the tape is full of unintelligible voices of children in the presumed classroom. The tape deck has multiple playback speeds so I used High in order to be able to record the whole phrase in the sample time allowed on the Amb0, then pitched it back down afterwards.

So that's sampled into the Amb0 and then I use it's LFOs to mostly control pitch. In hindsight I should have also routed the level and cutoff, maybe in the future. It can do some interesting things with the stepped LFO shapes to pitch as they contain sections that stop moving so the speech is still recognisable. Also the reverse delay is very good for glitching things as you can hear at the end."