JAX Unisonic (Audio Unit)

The 8X Unison Effect and multi pitch shifter with individual voice control and tempo delays.

JAX Unisonic is a special Audio Unit, able to produce up to 8 additional voices from any audio input (also polyphonic audio) by multiplying and shifting it in pitch and other parameters. Audio Units require a host application for operation.

The concept of JAX Unisonic is loosely derived from ‘Unison’ which was adopted from the ancient analog synthesizer world, where manufacturers and sound designers intended to fatten the sound by multiplying and stacking available voices together. Also digital synthesizers did adopt this technique to fatten sound sources. Due to the instability of analog oscillators and components and some wilful detuning, an interesting sonic effect is achieved, giving the produced tones significantly more presence and life. Unison voices are still excessively used in modern music styles today. (In classical music compositions ‘unisono’ basically means a performance, where multiple instruments or voices play the same parts in an ensemble fashion.)

Technical

Now JAX Unisonic can simulate this sonic effect with any audio source by incorporating a bank of independent time domain pitch shifters, that are optimized to detune and spread artificially multiplied voices in panorama. It can be understood as a kind of super chorus generator or an ensemble like effect with variable, realtime controlled intensity and pitch relation. But it is clearly something more.

With JAX Unisonic you can create up to 8 additional voices, that will be passed thru a chain of pitching and positioning, creating massively fattened sounds with any kind of voice input. Additionally you may transpose each voice individually per semitone to max. +/- 1 octave, something that cannot be achieved with usual choruses, unison or ensemble effects and moves the results slightly in the direction of the category “harmonizer” effects. Although the harmonic results can be programmed (automated) freely and are not auto generated in any way, as on some available other harmonizers.

The used pitch shifters in our JAX Unisonic are NOT based on the phase vocoder paradigm (FFT) and do not introduce the static latencies, which are unavoidable by the latter. A time domain pitch shifter in contradiction, uses very small delay buffers, where the latency is dynamically adjusted (dependent on the used pitch shifting amount) and much smaller and nearly latency-free. Such pitch shifters are better situated for live usage therefore. Although, such pitch shifters sound slightly more raw and tend to produce disharmonic overtones with more extreme values.

Usage

JAX Unisonic may be used as a massive unison effect generator or more decently for creating various, more subtile effects for improving sonic qualities of parts in a composition. For instance controlled voice detuning, manual pitch correction, doubling of vocals or solo instruments or just to give some boring voices more interest and static sound some special movement. It is even usable with drums, adding subtile or even massive new frequency components.