When I started this one, I was thinking I would do something with a vocoder. For anyone who doesn't know, a vocoder is a machine that takes one sound (traditionally a synth) and uses another sound to give it an envelope (traditionally a voice). This is usually the effect you're hearing when it sounds like a computer is talking. Think about daft punk's "around the world" or really almost any of their songs.

I don't own a hardware vocoder but there's a decent one on the nord G2. What I often like to do is to use something else in place of the voice, so instead of making a synth "talk" I give it the envelope properties of another synth or sound.

What I did here, was to create a sort of evolving noise patch. I used a whole bunch of LFOs (a repeating wave that you can use to turn things on/off/up/down) to make it sort of random sounding. Once I had my weird noise patch, which I was going to use as the "voice" part of the equation, I made a fairly simple chord out of different saw waves to run as the "synth" part.

By accident, I routed the noise patch into both parts of the vocoder. This has no effect on the sound since it's just putting it's own envelope onto itself, but I thought it might be cool to double the effect, which is possible. That's a way to bring out the words more clearly in the synth, but it turned out not to be too interesting here. I was about to get back on my planned path when I remembered another thing the vocoder can do, which is reverse the frequency bands. What this means is that the envelope from the highest pitched part of the "voice" signal is applied to the lowest pitched part of the "synth" one, the lowest to the highest and so on down the line. I flipped that switch and was pleasantly surprised by how much more interesting the patch got. I ended up using this reversed vocoder as the "voice" part of another vocoder, routed the chord into it, and recorded the output, which is today's sound.

here's the wav file

Why not go here and chat about it?