Pink Trombone
A human voice built from anatomy, after Pink Trombone by Neil Thapen. There is no sample and no oscillator bank in the usual sense: a model of the glottis makes the buzz of vocal folds, and a waveguide the shape of a throat, mouth and nose filters it into vowels, hums and hisses - the same physics as the thing in your neck.
Play it from MIDI: the held note is the pitch, velocity leans into the loudness. The Tongue pair steers the vowel - Front slides the tongue's hump between throat and teeth, Raise arches it toward the palate; ee, ah, oh and oo all live somewhere on those two knobs. Tenseness runs from breathy whisper to pressed buzz, and the model breathes on its own - tiny wanders in pitch and pressure that keep a held note alive. Wobble exaggerates them into a seasick warble; Drone keeps the voice sounding with no note held.
Squeeze pinches the tract shut at Place - lips at the top of the dial, throat at the bottom. A light squeeze makes fricatives (s, sh, f territory depending on Place), a full squeeze stops the air and releasing it pops a plosive. Nasal opens the velum so the sound escapes through the nose - hold it open for m and n hums, or colour a vowel with a little of it. Automate Tongue, Squeeze and Nasal from an LFO or a Slider and the organism babbles.
Parameters
| Front / Raise | where the tongue's hump sits and how high it arches - the vowel space. |
| Place / Squeeze | where and how hard the tract is pinched: none for vowels, a little for fricatives, all the way for stops. |
| Nasal | opens the passage to the nose. |
| Tenseness | vocal fold pressure, breath to buzz. Velocity scales the result. |
| Vibrato | depth of the deliberate pitch wave; the involuntary wander underneath never quite stops. |
| Wobble | adds a slow drunken drift to the pitch. |
| Drone | the voice keeps sounding with no MIDI note, at the last pitch it was given. |
| Level | output gain. |