The Dalekalizer

Back at Uni I was studying audio pipelines and signal processing and I stumbled across a text file written by someone at a university somewhere. It outlined how the BBC achieved the "voice" of the Daleks. It's quite simple really, you talk into a microphone, which is attached to a box. Inside the box is a signal generator that "opens and closes" a gate 30 times a second. When the "gate" is open, the sound from the microphone gets through. When the gate's closed, the sound is cut off (or multiplied by the 'gate wave'. This is called a Ring Modulator.

So, I set about creating one in Unix C. I downloaded some .AU raw audio files, and tried it out. It worked! So, I recorded some speech on my Sound Blaster Pro 2 at home, took it into Uni and Dalek'ed myself, much to the amusement of everyone else in the lab.

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So, I was raking through all my old Uni stuff, and came across the old notes I wrote about it. I fired up Visual Studio and remade it in C# for Windows.

I also realised that Star Wars droids use a similar system using a higher pitch than 30Hz and a different waveform, but same basic principle. So, I added a few options. I sent it to a few friends to play with, and forgot about it.

You can do similar stuff in Audacity, but it's not obvious. This a nice simple tool that just takes in a sound wave and spits out a ring-modulated sound wave. The sound file has to be sensible (no esoteric formats), so only .WAV is supported.

Instructions

  1. Download the ZIP file below
  2. Open the ZIP and copy the Dalek_Voice_2019\bin\Relese\Dalek_Voice_2019.exe somewhere
  3. Open the Dalek_Voice_2019.exe file
  4. Choose a .WAV file, preferrably of someone talking.
  5. Choose an output filename (or leave it as the default).
  6. Click Convert
  7. Open the output WAV file and chortle uproariously at your now be-Dalekked voice.
  8. Try other frequencies and waveforms for more hilarity.

Get it here:

Dalek_Voice_2019;

  • Note - The ZIP contains the entire VS2019 project, not just the compiled .exe, so if you want to adjust the code or just see how I did it, or if you want to just make a change for the sake of it, please do. If you want to poke fun at my crappy coding skills, that's absolutely fine too, just email none@none.com and I'll get to your complaint in due course :)