mouthpiece

you only move your lips

20 HP

A real talk box in the rack. Your sound goes up a clear tube into your mouth, and a mic hears what your mouth does to it. Then it reads your mouth back as voltages, with no voice at all. And it keeps what you said, so you can take the tube out and walk away.

The MOUTHPIECE panel: black, with an old skull's clenched teeth huge in gold dots, each crown a window of bare board, and a brass hose barb in the bite with a clear tube running off to the right.

Turn a knob: drag it or tap either side of it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. WORD clicks between three stops. KEEP is a button to press; held for two seconds it forgets the word. The skull is your mouth: drag on it, jaw up and down, tongue back and forward, or tab to it and use the arrows. Press and hold p, t, k and s and let go. The patches step on by themselves until you touch something.

A dark rack up the tube, and a mouth saying something round it. The mouth works before and after: Listen plays the patch from its top.

Off until you press. Your mic is only read here, as it happens: nothing's recorded or sent. Wear headphones, or it hears itself. Say long vowels: a page needs your voice, where the module needs none.

example patches

Everything MOUTHPIECE does here is its engine as designed, running in your browser, and it reads the mouth from nothing but what came back. The mouth is a model of one, because a page hasn't got yours: on the module it's your mouth, the tube is real and so is the mic. The band is a stand-in rack.

The tube

A small driver behind the panel plays VOICE up a metre of clear silicone tube, and the other end goes in your mouth. You shape the sound without making one. A mic clipped to the tube hears it come out of your lips, and that's what comes out of the module. The pitch is all your synth's. The vowels are all you. The tube pulls off the barb, and it's yours alone.

PUSH, the big knob: how hard it goes up the tube. Low, it's a thin voice. At noon it talks. At full the driver breaks up before it reaches your mouth, so you shape the breakup.
BITE: everything the mic hears that wasn't what went up the tube: pops, spit, breath, the room. At zero most of it's gone. About a third of the way it's as it came. At full it's in front of the sound.
TEETH: at zero you hear your mouth. Turn it up and a digital mouth takes over, following yours, its resonances pushed apart and sharpened. At full it's past anything a head can do.

It reads your mouth

It knows exactly what it sent up the tube, so it can take that out of what comes back and see the shape of your mouth alone, 125 times a second. That takes no voice. With nothing in VOICE, a faint hiss in the tube is enough. So your mouth is a silent controller for the whole rack: open it and a filter opens three modules away.

The teeth are the read. Your jaw shows in how far up them the light goes, your tongue in how far round. They go dark when your lips shut.

Then you walk away

Press KEEP and the mouth you're making goes into the next of four places, with the last quarter of a second of spit, and a root lights for it. A mouth on the tube always wins. Take the tube out and a second or two later it goes on saying what you kept, as a digital mouth, for as long as you like, with nobody there.

WORD: three stops. Fully left it holds the last mouth you kept. In the middle it steps through them. Fully right it slides from each into the next.
CLOCK: moves it on. Unpatched, it keeps the rhythm of your taps.
SAY: a voltage says it instead, 0 V the first mouth and 8 V the last, so an LFO says it slowly and an envelope says it once.
KEEP: a gate, the same as the button, so a sequencer can catch your mouth on the beat. Hold the button for two seconds and it forgets the word.

What goes in

VOICE: audio, what goes up the tube. A saw talks best.
MIC: a socket for a dynamic mic, or a small electret on plug-in power. No phantom.
PUSH, TEETH: CVs, added to their knobs.

What comes out

TALK: your synth, talking. With nobody there, the word.
SPIT: what BITE works on, by itself: your consonants as a sound of their own.
JAW: your mouth's first resonance as a CV, 200 Hz to 1 kHz over 0 to 8 V. It rises as you open your jaw.
TONGUE: the second, 600 Hz to 2.8 kHz over 0 to 8 V. It rises as your tongue comes forward.
LIPS: a gate, high while your lips are open. Say "pa pa pa" and it rattles.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a hose barb and tube, 2 knobs, 1 big knob, a three-stop switch, 1 button

Inputs

VOICE: audio
MIC: a dynamic, or an electret on plug-in power
CLOCK, KEEP: gates
SAY: CV, 0 to 8 V
PUSH, TEETH: CV

Outputs

TALK, SPIT: audio
JAW, TONGUE: CV, 0 to 8 V
LIPS: gate