(Oral) Cavity / Audio Feedback

I am still sicking with this oral cavity idea, unfortunately, although I think it's going to be amazing if everything works as imagine.

The main idea is not to reproduce a talkbox (human voiced musical instrument) but to use oral cavity (or any cavity in general) to close an acoustic feedback loop in the middle.

The closest musical example I could think of is, of course, Sitting in the room by Alvin Lucier.



There are two differences in this project from Lucier's piece. First, here the cavity I choose (it may or may not be oral cavity) takes the role of the room, which I can dynamically change because of the small scale of the cavity I chose (or the variety of the cavity). Second, instead of keep recording the playback of the recording iteratively, I create a direct feedback by putting the cavity between a mic and a speaker.

Even though I can generate sound without any sound synthesis algorithm just by connecting speaker directly to microphone just by closing the feedback loop with the cavity, there will be sound processing in the middle so that I have more control on sound with a set of sensors.

The other piece similar to this idea is Pendulum Music by Steve Reich given I utilize audio feedback. I will skip the video because it's already there.

It's always nice to look at some example from human vocoder/sonovox/talk box (although that's not the idea ) because the apparatus that I will create may look very similar to talk box,



The main difference is that speaker (hose in the case of talkbox) will play a processed sound of mic input. It will sound nothing like a synthesized voice even if it is processed via oral cavity. The only advantage of oral cavity in this scenario is that I can control the shape of the cavity.