Welcome to Robot Vowels

Thanks for spending some time to get more familiar with Robot Vowels. Robot Vowels is a formant filter with distortion.

Morph area #

The large area at the top of Robot Vowels is the morph area. Or maybe it’s the formant forest? Vowel Drome? Look, we haven’t settled on a name just yet. Moving the dot around interpolates between different vowel sounds, as well as octave up and down versions of those vowels. Holding option and clicking or dragging snaps to the exact vowel positions.

Voice #

We recorded multiple human singers, so the frequency responses match actual recordings of people singing. The voice setting switches between different singers.

Distortion #

Robot Vowels includes three distortion models that replicate different types of analogue distortion. 1 is more subtle, 2 is heavier. 3 is even more extreme.

Order #

By default, the formant filtering happens first, and the result is fed into the distortion. Clicking the order button flips things around, so the signal is distorted first, then filtered. Both are good.

Input, mix, and output #

The input and output dials control the gain going into and out of the filter and distortion processing — they do not affect the dry signal. Therefore, turning the mix dial all the way to be fully dry is identical to bypassing Robot Vowels. The input and output gain can be used to make up lost volume from the filtering.