My history... with vocoders

For all Atari Falcon users:  The full version of Voxx is now free! For more details click on the third pot.

I was captured by its sound from the first time I heard it. I think it was a robot voice. My first attempt to create this kind of sound was applying a microphone thru an amplifier to the CV input of my first synthesizer, a Yamaha CS10. The result was a fried oscillator in the PWM section!

When ordering custom PCB’s got affordable for me in the early 90's, I build a 12 Band analog vocoder with patch capabilities for each band. Some months later a musician begged me to sell it and I accepted due the fact that I was planning to build a new one, this time using a DSP. Fortunately at this time the Atari Falcon-030 was announced and I managed to get one of the first charges reserved for developers. So I started to learn  DSP-assembler, C and TOS at the same time on that fabulous computer that offered all the required hardware (DSP, DAC and CPU) for my projects.

The result was a 16-band 24db/octave vocoder, with a spectrum analyzer, band patch matrix, variable envelope followers,  panorama and a 3D look and feel skin.

I called it Voxx and launched it in 1993. It was distributed by me and maybe it was the first available real-time software vocoder in the world (if someone can prove that I am wrong  please let me know!).

If you want to hear how Voxx sounded, click here for a chorded example and here for the robot example. The speech used for this demo sounds are in german, from a female speaker talking about the features of a Yamaha workstation of those years.

An extensive review (in german) of Voxx can still be found here