ASPIRE Evo Aspiration Noise Processor

ASPIRE Evo is the world's first tool for modifying a voice's breathiness independently of its harmonic content. Whether reducing a bit of vocal rasp or adding a bit of smokiness, ASPIRE Evo allows modification of the amount and quality of a voice’s aspiration noise without otherwise affecting the vocal’s harmonic characteristics.

When you speak or sing, air from your lungs is forced through your vocal chords, causing them to vibrate. The resulting waveform is propagated through the throat, the mouth and out through the lips. It is the shape of these structures that create the resonant characteristics that define a unique vocal identity.

But going into a bit more detail, the vocal waveform is actually a combination of two different components. One, the one we usually think of as the primary element of vocal timbre, is the harmonic content generated by the process described above. However, there is a second component that is generated by the turbulence of the air rushing past the vocal chords. This component, aspiration noise, does not have harmonic content and can roughly be thought of as “breathiness.”

Aspiration noise presents itself in a variety of ways, from a subtle bit of breathiness to a full-blown rasp. Of course, whether it’s a problem or not depends on the amount of noise and the style of a performance. A whole lot of roughness that would work well for screaming punk or roots blues might well be a problem for mainstream pop or a smooth ballad (of course, it also might not). Up to now, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Now, with ASPIRE Evo, there is.

Audio Example

This demo consists of three repetitions of the same vocal track used above in the MUTATOR demo. The first is the unprocessed voice. The same phrase is then repeated with ASIPRE set to increase the aspiration noise to give the voice a grittier sound and then again with ASPIRE Evo set to reduce the aspiration noise for a smoother sound. Note that in each case, the basic harmonic quality of the voice remains unchanged.

ASPIRE Evo Demo

In these first two demos, we use MUTATOR Evo's Pitch Shift and Throat Modeling to create relatively natural variations of the original vocal.

Demo 1 - Shift down
Demo 2 - Shift up

In the next demo, we combine Pitch Shift, Throat Modeling, and one of the 24 varieties of Mutation to turn our vocalist into a demon.

Demo 3 - Demonize

Alienization

Alienization is a realtime process that chops the audio input up into sections and plays each section backwards. The Dialect control selects the length of the sections.

In this first example, we apply Alienization with a medium Dialect setting to the otherwise unaffected vocal.

Demo 4 - Basic Alienization

In the next example, we add another variety of Mutation and set Dialect to a shorter period, allowing more recognizable bits of the original phrase to come though.

Demo 5 - Short period Alienization

Finally, yet another variety of Mutation with Dialect set to a much longer period, moving fully into the land of the weird.

Demo 6 - Long period Alienization

Tempo-Synced Alienization

In this demo by Allen Papouban, MUTATOR Evo's new Tempo-Synced Alienization function is used to sync the alienized vocal to the tempo of the song.

Demo 7 - Tempo-Synced Alienization

Automating Variations

All of MUTATOR Evo's various tools can be automated. Here we torture our vocal for the last time, varying pitch shift, throat models, mutation, processed/original mix and alienization.

Demo 8 - Automated Variation

In this final demo, singer/songwriter Hope Mayo has been gracious enough to let us muck about with her lovely song "My Life." We processed her vocal track in real time with one instance of MUTATOR, using automation to vary the pitch shift, throat length and width, original and processed mix (to produce harmony), and even a little alienization (sorry, we couldn't help ourselves). We have included the track in its original form so that you can clearly hear what MUTATOR Evo has done with it (plus, it's just a really nice song that deserves to be heard the way Hope intended).

Original track

Processed track