Robot

A spectral effect that turns any sound into a robotic, monotone buzz. It analyses the incoming audio with an FFT and forces every frequency bin to the same phase, collapsing whatever you feed it onto a single fixed pitch — the classic sci-fi robot voice, equally at home on drums, pads, or noise.

How it works

Robot runs a short-time Fourier transform on the signal and rewrites it before resynthesis. By zeroing the phase of every bin on each analysis hop, the reconstructed waveform lands as a steady pulse train at a fixed fundamental (around 187.5 Hz), so the source's pitch flattens onto one droning tone while its rhythm, timbre, and formants ride on top. A harmonic comb and a spectral tilt then sculpt how that tone reads. Processing is fully stereo, preserving the source's left/right image. Expect a short latency and a soft fade-in as the first analysis frame fills.

Controls

  • Harm — comb strength, the heart of the robot voice. Low keeps the source recognizable and only lightly mechanized; high kills everything but the fixed harmonic series, leaving a strongly pitched, buzzy robot. Output level is compensated as you push it so loudness stays roughly constant.
  • Tilt — spectral balance. Centered is flat; turn up to bias toward high frequencies for a brittle, metallic robot, or down to favour the lows for a thick sub-buzz.
  • Drive — how hard the robotized spectrum is pushed into the output saturator. Center (1.0x) is the original behaviour; pull back toward 0.5x for a cleaner, tidier robot that stays under the clip, or push up to 2.0x for a dirtier, harder-clipped grit.
  • Mix — wet/dry blend. Fully up is the full effect; back it off to fold the robotized tone in under the dry signal.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — stereo audio to process; each channel is metallized independently and its image preserved. Patch one side for mono.
  • Harm / Tilt / Drive / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to sweep the comb, tilt, saturation, or wet/dry for talking, morphing textures.
  • Out L / Out R — the processed stereo signal.

Tips

  • Feed it speech, a vocal sample, or a melodic loop and crank Harm for the full monotone-robot effect — the words stay intelligible while the pitch flattens.
  • Modulate Tilt CV with an LFO or envelope to make the robot sweep between dark sub-buzz and bright metallic chatter.
  • It needs no oscillator of its own — patch noise or a drum loop in and Robot will pitch it for you.