Tried to extract my own glottal pulse to make the synth sound more human.

@x0 @BorrisInABox Lol! The wild thing is... it would technically work? The formant filters don't care what you feed them. They just shape whatever harmonic-rich input they get. So we could get: WASHING MACHINE DEMON → formant filters → "h̷̰͝e̵̢͠l̷̨͘l̷͚̚o̵̱͝" The formants would still try to impose vowel shapes on the chaos. It would be cursed.

@x0 @BorrisInABox could give it a try for you and give you a speechplayer.dll for it. Would be nuts. Would sound broken. Never for production. But I have a version of the speechplayer with glottal table support, so I just use librosa to extract what I need and hand you a speechplayer.dll lol

@Tamasg @x0 Oh boy. Now I want to try shaping some bad noises I made with a big metal fan about twenty years ago with formant filters. I could probably make a few single-cycle wave forms exist.

Tried to extract my own glottal pulse to make the synth sound more human. Learned my voice is too gentle for radio. Sadness fills my soul. That's probably why I didn't stick with radio shows.
I recorded sustained vowels and used IAIF (Iterative Adaptive Inverse Filtering) to extract my glottal waveform - the raw "buzz" before your throat shapes it into vowels.
What I expected: Rich, characterful human excitation to replace the mathematical model.
What I got: A softer, breathier sound than pure math!
The mathematical LF model with sharpness cranked to 10 actually produces MORE harmonics than my actual voice does. That "chest resonant radio announcer" sound? That's aggressive glottal snap that not everyone has.

Tried to extract my own glottal pulse to make the synth sound more human. Learned my voice is too gentle for radio. Sadness fills my soul. That's probably why I didn't stick with radio shows.
I recorded sustained vowels and used IAIF (Iterative Adaptive Inverse Filtering) to extract my glottal waveform - the raw "buzz" before your throat shapes it into vowels.
What I expected: Rich, characterful human excitation to replace the mathematical model.
What I got: A softer, breathier sound than pure math!
The mathematical LF model with sharpness cranked to 10 actually produces MORE harmonics than my actual voice does. That "chest resonant radio announcer" sound? That's aggressive glottal snap that not everyone has.

@Tamasg @BorrisInABox Or it's like what softvoice did, all the different sources. Wait a minute! Is that the problem you're having with a female source? Do you need a real female glottal pulse to start from?

@Tamasg Ooo, audio please.

@mcourcel lol sounds horrible!

@mcourcel lol sounds horrible!

@Tamasg Hehehehehe lolol, sort of like E-Speak.

@BorrisInABox @Tamasg I got A.Liv on the Surge discord to kindly work with my source material and the results are now called Exocat's Metalodon in the 3rd-party wavetables folder of Surge's factory data.

@BorrisInABox @Tamasg This is the raw source material, which I later trimmed and did some noise reduction on, and then A.Liv carefully turned it into something that was a consistent period to be turned into wavetables, I think at 2048 samples per frame.

@Tamasg @mcourcel oh god that sounds so bad

@BorrisInABox @Tamasg This is the raw source material, which I later trimmed and did some noise reduction on, and then A.Liv carefully turned it into something that was a consistent period to be turned into wavetables, I think at 2048 samples per frame.

@BorrisInABox @Tamasg SO if you actually wanted to do that for whatever reason, I can send you the wavetables which are already fixed length single-cycle waveforms, unless you already have surge.

@x0 @BorrisInABox lol! Can't even explain what it did, but it definitely introduces a metallic quality unlike any I've heard in speech synthesis before. Not even as tube-like as when I tried mine was, but boy is it bad. That grindyness really shows through.

@Tamasg @BorrisInABox lmfaoooooo what, that's like the odd source of softvoice

@BorrisInABox Oh cool! For the extraction I recorded 5 sounds:
"ahh" sustained at normal pitch (~5 sec)
2. "ahh" sustained at low pitch (~5 sec)
3. "ahh" sustained at high pitch (~5 sec)
4. "shhh" sustained fricative (~5 sec)
5. "th" sustained unvoiced (~3 sec)
The "ahh" vowels are for glottal pulse extraction at different F0s. The "sh" and "th" are for noise/frication characteristics.
Recording tips:
• Condenser or dynamic mic (I used a Blue Snowball, AT2005 was too noisy)
• Peaks around -5 to -8 dB (NOT quiet - my first attempt at -30 dB was useless)
• Steady volume, no vibrato
• Quiet room
• 44100 Hz, mono
The key is getting a clean, loud, boring sustained vowel - no expression, just pure steady tone. The more monotone the better for extraction!

@BorrisInABox Small add-on for the voice recording set: raw audio only, please — no noise suppression, auto gain, compressor/limiter, or EQ. The boring part matters here: keep the vowel steady with no vibrato, because I’m aligning and averaging glottal cycles and pitch wobble makes the final source less crisp. If you can, include ~10 seconds of room tone (silence) in a file, so I can calibrate noise and hum. And when you record “th”, make it the “think” version (/θ/). Optional but very helpful: a sustained “zzzz” (/z/) and “vvvv” (/v/) so I can capture voicing + turbulence together for better “edge” control later. Hope this helps too. LOL if this works out your voice would be forever partially captured into a synth. LOL.

@Tamasg @BorrisInABox Ooo, a Boris voice synth coming soon!