Hi folks, this was my first entry in the Junto.
My text-to-speech of choice was the Speech Synthesizer that comes stock with FL Studio. My first thought was to try some Lovecraftian argot, but “Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” didn’t exactly roll off the digital tongue either.
The phrase I based my piece around was “We use every part of the buffalo”. I got a nice chant-like groove of “We we we use… every part” and then sent that into Izotope Vocalsynth. I looped it and recorded as I fiddled with various settings and this gave me tons of variations to play with in the arrangement phase. Some ended up with a throat-singing resonance that I really liked, which brought my piece into a different direction than I had when I started.
I experimented with extreme time and pitch shifting, reverse echoes, and all sorts of fun sound design stuff to the vocoded chant sections. I also added layers of glitchy drum-machine type stuff from closely cropped fricatives and sibilance, but I ended up echoing them into oblivion by the time I was done. The final layering, arrangement, and mixing was done in Reaper.
