From Sound Morphing to the Synthesis of Starlight. Musical experiences with the Phase Vocoder over 25 years

Abstract

The article reports the author’s experiences with the phase vocoder. Starting from the first attempts during the years 1973-77 – in connection with a speculative project to morph the sounds of a speaking voice into sounds from the natural world, project subsequently developed at Ircam in Paris between 1979 and 1986 – up to the most recent experiences in 2011-12 associated with the realization of Supernova, an 8-channel sound-surround piece, where the phase vocoder data format is used as a synthesis tool.