A Supercollider Class for Vowel Synthesis and Its Use for Sonification

In this paper, we present building blocks for the synthesis of vowel sounds in the programming language SuperCollider. We discuss the advantages of using vowel based synthesis, and make a review where it has already been used in sonifications. Then, we describe in detail the main class Vowel which handles all parameters related to the formants that are typically used for vowel synthesis. In order to simplify the handling of the Vowel class, we introduce two auxiliary pseudo Ugens: Formants for additive synthesis, and BPFStack for subtractive synthesis. This introduction of the building blocks is followed by code examples for sound synthesis, which make use of the described classes and their specific features. We finally present sample applications, showing how these building blocks can be used in sonification.