radio "drop out/interference" effect

[pheeleep]

I am going to try to recreate radio interference.

I have two characters talking to each other on a CB radio ( one is in a star ship and the other is at headquarters ). I want to create interference for the pilot's voice, so we get the impression he is far away.... his voice should get deformed once in a while...

I was going to reverse a few syllables and also automate volume on the voice so it drops out once in a while. Any other suggestion? So far I have been able to make the voices sound as if they are being heard over a radio, but I need to create this "interference" effect...

It's for this month's Sci Fi contest in the KVR cafe

[Meffy]

If I were trying this, I might use periods of gating for a sputtery effect... a phaser wafting about at low frequency... maybe some pulses of good old white-noise static... and bursts of coarse granular resynthesis (kind of an audio equivalent of blocky video breakup) for the garbled bits. Maybe some vocoding... if you could decrease the bit-depth during performance, that would simulate loss of resolution due to poor transmission. All these effects and maybe a few others would fade in and out.

Good luck!

[pheeleep]

Thanks so much. The obvious one: Decreasing bit depth... I hadn't even though of that! Thanks for your suggestions..

[Kingston]

what Anthro_mephitis said,

you could also use the free FM radio effect that www.voxengo.com did long a go. It doesn't seem to be at his site anymore though...

Also, record real bursts and stutters from real radio whilst you tune it, not just white noise. You can fade these in and out with the real conversation going. I've done it once and it's as authentic as it gets.

[tetraplan]

I am going to try to recreate radio interference.

I have two characters talking to each other on a CB radio ( one is in a star ship and the other is at headquarters ). I want to create interference for the pilot's voice, so we get the impression he is far away.... his voice should get deformed once in a while...

I was going to reverse a few syllables and also automate volume on the voice so it drops out once in a while. Any other suggestion? So far I have been able to make the voices sound as if they are being heard over a radio, but I need to create this "interference" effect...

I made a patch in AudioMulch that was inspired by the "intercom-voices" in the movie THX-1138. It involves bit-crushing and AM.

I used the fileplayer, fed that into DigiGrunge (the bitcrusher), removed top- and bottom-end, patched the signal into RingAM which was modulated by risset-tones that went through DLGranulator to break the signal up, mixed that with the simple "radioed" signal.
Sounded great! Very much like the "intercom-voices" as I remember them.

I think a compressor or limiter could be used to make the sound more compact and let the artefacts come to the foreground a bit more.
Maybe add noise and heavy ducking.

Groet, Erik

[Steven West]

The best to me is still the Bad Tune effect on a Roland's SP-808. Uses the Step Modulator on the bit depth reductions, and throws a spike in just for good measure. Always will be my fave.

[jtxx000]

ConcreteFX lofi

[haydxn]

ps . o/t j dub your song sounds great as the experimental vurt-y climax to the KVR:MCR CD. it's almost as if you were there!

lo-fi effects are a lot of fun to come up with. Even if you suss it, if you need to do it again it's good to experiment with new ideas you have learned to make it some other way.

good luck with your endeavours

[meeks]

I don't know if this helps, but there is a "sample reducer" effect that I've been playing with at:

http://hem.bredband.net/tbtaudio/plugins.html

it's pretty cool