Anyone who has ever watched Doctor Who will be familiar with the peculiarly distorted voice of the Dalek. According to the Wikipedia entry, the original voice sounds were created with ring modulation. While simple passive circuits for this effect exist, there are plenty of ways to expand on this idea and create your own custom voice changer circuit. For instance, check out this forum post to see what people are experimenting with.
Passive circuits are fun to experiment with, but us DIYers know that we still have to deal with amplification, mixing, and output control to have a useful audio circuit. A popular circuit schematic from a Velleman Voice Changer Kit is publicly available:
While us DIYers can go through the trouble of sourcing all of the parts of a circuit, breadboarding this circuit, then finally creating our own custom PCB, all of this extra work takes away our limited time for sound exploration and creativity. I dare you to find a HT8950 Voice Modulator IC and its related components for cheaper than the price of a kit available from our friends at JAMECO! The kit includes all of the components that you’ll need to build your circuit along with a top-notch PCB that is guaranteed to work!
If you’re new to building DIY circuits, YouTube channel element14 presents has an excellent in-depth tutorial on how to build this kit, along with some great tech insights about the circuit and its components.
Make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel for more great circuit videos!
Until next time, happy hacking and DIYing!
