What You Say?

What You Say? (v1.0.0) is part of The Most Useless Plugins collection: a playable vintage Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) speech synthesizer, melodic lyric Piano-Roll sequencer (Vox Roll), and circuit-bent 10-pole vocal-tract vocoder engineered in Rust after late-1970s and 1980s talking toys, arcade speech boards, and home computer voice synthesizers.

Nobody asked for a 1978 spelling toy soldered to a singing lyric piano-roll — yet here it is, chomping its tin jaw at you:
We live in the golden age of hyper-realistic neural singing models that can impersonate an opera choir down to the last breath. Naturally, the logical response was to spend hundreds of hours modeling five obsolete 1980s silicon speech chips (TMS5220, SP0256-AL2, Votrax SC-01A, Sanyo VLM5030, and Oki MSM6295), wiring a virtual alligator clip across their D0..D9 ROM data pins, and strapping an animated tin-toy robot to the dashboard whose pupils follow your mouse cursor.

Every voice runs two synchronized 10-pole LPC engines in parallel: a clean Dry Core that pronounces your typed lyrics intelligibly at exact MIDI or Piano-Roll pitches, and a Wet Bent twin ready to starve the clock on the Pitchwheel, XOR-corrupt reflection stages on the Modwheel, stutter-freeze ROM addresses on the Sustain Pedal, and scream into acid filter self-oscillation on Velocity. Flip Source to Vocoder to feed external synths or drum breaks straight through the 10-pole larynx. Gloriously unnecessary.

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Cross-Platform Release & Installation

What You Say? is compiled, signed, and packaged natively for Linux, Windows, and macOS:

• Linux (x86_64): Native CLAP (~/.clap/) and VST3 (~/.vst3/) bundles.
• Windows (x86_64): Native CLAP (C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP\) and VST3 (C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\) bundles.
• macOS (Universal2 — Apple Silicon & Intel): Native Apple Logic Pro / GarageBand / MainStage Audio Unit v2 (what-you-say.component) (with automatic floating On-Screen QWERTY Keyboards for typing lyrics and preset names inside Logic Pro!) and CLAP (what-you-say.clap) bundles. (On macOS, clear Gatekeeper quarantine once in Terminal: sudo xattr -cr /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/what-you-say.component.)

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2-Layer Architecture & Circuit-Bent Speech Engine

1. Permanent 4-Block Synth & Circuit-Bend Console

• Retro VFD & Animated Tin-Toy Robot: Live vacuum-fluorescent word/phoneme/pitch/bar readout alongside a tin automaton that snoozes with floating Z z z bubbles when idle, tracks your cursor when awake, and chomps in sync with live vowel formants (click either to audition!).
• 5 Iconic Vintage Speech Chips + External Vocoder: Switch instantly between TI TMS5220 (Speak & Spell, Atari), GI SP0256-AL2 (Intellivoice cascade allophones), Votrax SC-01A (Q*bert, Kraftwerk analog formants), Sanyo VLM5030 (Konami arcades), and Oki MSM6295 (Capcom 4-bit ADPCM)—with Mono, 8-Voice Poly, or Stereo Choir ensemble voices and internal Chip vs. external DAW Vocoder excitation.
• Hardware Bus Short-Circuiting (D0..D9 & K1..K10 Scope): Watch clean DRY vs. mutated WET vocal-tract reflection poles in real time, toggle or right-click solo individual D0..D9 hardware data-bus pins, starve the chip clock, push lattice poles into Q-Res scream, and latch rhythmic Address Stutter loops (Size, Rate, Jitter) protected by a -0.1 dBFS brickwall safety limiter.

2. Workspace A — [ VOX ROLL ] Melodic Lyric Piano-Roll Sequencer

• Syllable-Stretched Lyric Piano-Roll: Type any multi-line lyrics, auto-hyphenate syllables with one click via the built-in CMU Dictionary ([Syllables (-)]) or toggle [Spell A-Z], and sculpt cyan leading consonants, emerald vowel cores, S-curve F0 pitch glides, .MID import/export, Scale Lock (8 scales), Swing, and 64-step Undo/Redo.
• 6 Per-Note Expression Lanes & Drag-and-Drop: Draw per-note Vibrato, Velocity, Ratchet (1x..8x), Clock / Formant (±12 st), Bit-Flip XOR, and Legato Glide—or drop .mid/.midi melodies and .txt/.lrc lyrics straight onto the plugin window.

3. Workspace B — [ LIVE KEYBOARD ] & 2-Octave Phoneme Organ

• 4 Direct MIDI Trigger Modes: Play melodies word-by-word in Phrase Stepper, chop vocals from C2 upward in Word Pads, short-circuit a 64-cell (8×8) hex matrix in ROM Glitch, or play sustained vowels (AA, EH, IY, AE, OW, UW, ER on white keys) and percussive consonants (SS, TT, KK, PP, SH/RR on black keys) on the 2-Octave Visual Phoneme Organ (C3..B4).

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📖 What You Say? User Manual & Sound Design Guide

Need the lyrics punctuation/hyphenation syntax, external DAW vocoder setup, all 25 factory presets, or the searchable parameter & MIDI controller tables?

👉 Open Interactive What You Say? User Manual & Sound Guide →

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Part of The Most Useless Plugins collection.