Here's something from the vaults. Aquasound was built with these requirements in mind:

• Generate sounds that aquatic animals might make
• Sounds can be "combined" somehow
• Sounds can emote

This was never used in production. I wonder if I could turn this into something? Like a paid iPhone app? ;)

Double-click the envelopes to add/remove control points. Drag lines up & down to change their curviture. The best feature is the "Combine With" dropdown, which splices the current sound with your selection. Also the "Emote" menu will play sounds with different expression.

The audio algorithm is reverse-engineered from my beloved FS1R. I generated formants in two ways (toggle the "Tonal" checkbox to hear both), the "atonal" version is closer to ring modulation than actual formants. It's more fun if you don't understand what the controls are doing, but if you insist: Pitch controls the overall pitch of the sound. Freq controls the center frequency of the formant (like a bandpass filter). LFOFreq and LFOWeight control a low-frequency sine wave, which can be applied to other controls via their "___LFOAmt" curves. Amp is amplitude, Width is formant width (think: width of the bandpass filter), Skirt adds distortion. Each voice has two formant generators, check "Formant Active" to enable them.

May all your bloops and crackles be happy ones!

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Here's my first attempt at LPC speech in Flash: (click & explore)

It's great, except for one tiny problem: It sounds horrific. Can you feel the cold, robotic love? This voice will stalk your nightmares.

The phonemes were derived from an unrehearsed recording of my voice. I'm confident that it can be improved. Note that direct LPC encodings of my voice, such as this one, sound more acceptable.

EDIT: I made an iPhone version, "Metal Mouth", with lots of features. Here it is on YouTube and the iTunes Store!

EDIT #2: The source code is available here.

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