How were the “singing vowels” patched in the early modulars?
I see that most early modulars only had one band pass filter so how was this achieved ?
Was the fixed filter bank utilised?
When I was a Clavia Nord Modular/G2 geek, I remember having tried to reproduce some basic formant filter. For that purpose, I searched some useful information about how vowels are formed.
Vowels are consequence of the shape of many resonators, the most important of which is the mouth cavity. The shape determines which frequencies will be emphasized, and a combination of certain frequencies will lead to a certain vowel.
I remember reading that any vowel can be accurately modelled by using 4-5 bandpass ffilters in parallel. However, the first 2 frequency peaks are the most characterisitc and two well tuned filters can do 75% of the job.
So… you only have to find that formant frequency-per-vowel table online, and experiment with at least two BPF 
Oh… phasers and flangers can, under certains static settings, act as combfilters and give you what you want.
The MF-105-M MURF is pretty good at voweling.
If you’re into modulars then there are formant filters you can purchase. Cwejman makes a four band VC resonant filter bank that is good for formant sounds
http://www.cwejman.net/res-4.htm
The only non-modular synth I remember that had a formant filter was the very rare Synton Syrinx. Any multi-timbral synth with a multimode filter could do formant filter using layering (at the expense of polyphony)
Choir and vowel sounds are the “acid test” of a good filter. When I am auditioning a synth it is one of the first patches I will try to dial up.
And yes the 105M does do good formant filtering but you don’t have width control of the bands.
Slightly OT, but maybe valuable for Voyager owners looking for these -
The Voyager has a number of examples of vowel-sound patches in the factory banks. Among them:
Zon Bank:
RoboVox
Vowel bass
Funny Vox
Bo
Electric Blue Bank:
Vocal PulseMod
Tomitavox
RME Bank:
Asao’s Cakewalk
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list – just a few of the patches I quickly identified in the factory banks.
- Greg
Yves Usson (Mr. Minibrute) has a web page showing the filter settings for some vowels here: http://yusynth.net/VocalFilter/ForVoc.html
This page also has a formant frequency chart: http://www.marksmart.net/sounddesign/choirsounds/choirsounds.html.
excellent! thanx for this!!! 
Cool thread. The Roland AX09 has a “scat singing” patch. The syllables go from " ooh" to “BOW” depending on velocity. Digital though. I use CV control pedal on the Voyager to make vocal-like tone changes.
the Grendel is a nice Formant Filter
http://youtu.be/SC80S3AVVb0
Here’s a demo I did Running a sawtooth from the voyager XL, with the ladder filter open, into Eric Archer’s Grendel formant filter. I’m using the X and Y outs from the touchpad to control the filter, which works really well!
Really nice work on the Cloud Tommy and thanks for you folks pointing out Eric Archer and his Grendel filter - is he a member of this forum, too? Sorry if it’s a little off-topic but this video piece is a mindblower: https://vimeo.com/11885641
You can definitely get lots of great formant sounds with the Voyager filters alone starting with the VOX patches listed and a CP251 and maybe a MF-103 phaser ~ but that Grendel filter is something else again, and makes me suddenly want to start picking up some eurorack gear…
Worth mentioning, if you are using digital soft synths the formant filters in U-HE Zebra (from Urs Heckmann) are superb.
is there a comb filter in the MF-108 ClusterFlux? It sure sounds like it to me!
If you dial it in right with the regular Voyager filters, you will find those formant sounds… and with the ClusterFlux, the Phaser and/or the Band Pass filter in the MiniBrute combinations you can really hear those vowel formant filter sounds, as well… i think maybe having a second LFO to modulate helps, too, like a CP-251 or LFO 2 in the XL - unfortunately I am not much of a scientist - i tend to dial in the sounds I’m ‘looking for’ with my ears rather than patch charts… but I found a great SOS article on formants and synthesis here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar01/articles/synthsec.asp
And you hear well because -actually- a flanger is a combfilter which time setting is LFOed.
Thanks for the replies. I guess the early 70’s modulars must have used a combination of 904 C band pass / Fixed filter bank / and maybe the 923? There’s not much info out there
see Allen Strange’s Electronic Music System page 158 Figure 9.44 Simulated vowel formants
patch is
Oscillator to multi to 3x Bandpass and 3x VCA to mixer
Me asking some what different question - How you doing with vowels as per the info suggested? Ultimately where you arrived?
There are lots of guitar processors that have Vowel effects
(Korg’s Pandora and EHX Talking Pedal come to mind).
But there’s a Dual (true) Analog Filter pedal called “Wahoo”
by Sonuus that can do many things including vowel simulation:
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Wahoo
http://www.sonuus.com/products_wahoo.html
Each of its multimode filters can be independently controlled by:
Foot Pedal, LFO, Envelope, or Pitch (!)
Yes..getting there. But its a lot of hit and miss, using the 3C limitations of the early 70’s I don’t want to use new gizmos on the system so am building an x-y pedal which I think should achieve the Tomita type vowels etc.
I didn’t know of this book..Amazon have it for…£250 !!!
I think there is a PDF…does anyone have a link?