Educational Vowel Synth and ControlSurface Widget
Some months ago I had the idea of doing a Vowel Synthesizer program which could help children to understand why the vowel triangle has some sense and it also could be used to train foreign language vowels.
The core of the idea is that axes correspond mostly to the position of the first two formants F1 and F2. So by a simple mapping, given a point on the triangle you could synthesize any vowel even those in the middle. Also by analyzing incoming voice from a microphone, the system could place a point in the triangle that identifies how far one is from the intended vowel.
I did a first prototype which synthesized something far from human but at least you can identify the vowels when you place the proper frequencies. As i had a proof of concept i stopped there.
This easter i improved the prototype by adding a new control widget: The ControlSurface, which control two parameters by moving a single point. It is really more handy than having two sliders and it is perfect for parameter exploration, not just for the Vowel Synthesizer.
It will also force a change on the way the CLAM Prototyper address the binding of controls as it controls two parameters and our current system binds a widget to a single inlet.
This is great. I searched for "vowel synth" on google images and this is one of the images that it came up with, yours. I like the educational aspect- as a training tool. Scalably universal :)
What software were you using to create this? Looks like a prettier max/msp
Jordan-
midinerd towards gmail dot com
thread: 117613807226375341 I used ULAM http://clam-project.org, a free software project i've been involved in for so long.
What i explained in the entry (two years ago!) was a proof of concept that an student of the Google Summer of Code 2007 extended further giving more realism, but still some work to do. We are a free software project so any helping hand is wellcome.