The Orb

What it does

A vowel formant filter. Three bandpass filters imitate the formants of a human voice, and the orb interface divides into sectors with one vowel each. Distance from the centre sets emphasis, the angle sets drift in hertz, and a smoothing control decides how abruptly one vowel turns into the next. Vowel count runs from two to ten, with male, female and child sets or a custom set retuned by typing frequencies in. Three LFOs drive vowel, emphasis and drift, each with rate, phase, shape and direction.

In the demo

Jade runs it in AUM on a Zenology patch fed chords from a MIDI app, turning the formants off first so each control is audible on its own. She then puts it across a drum loop, a field recording and the output of a no-input mixer.

Worth knowing

Jade uses it as a movement effect inside a mix rather than as a tone shaper, mostly on drones and noise. The desktop build is sold separately from AudioThing’s own site.