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Baby Audio Humanoid

Vocal Transformation Software By Robin Bigwood
Published November 2024

Baby Audio Humanoid

Transform your boring old human vocals with Baby Audio’s latest plug‑in!

Mangled, manipulated vocal sounds can be a big part of many electronic, dance and experimental musical genres. And they’re exactly what Humanoid, a new plug‑in from California‑based Baby Audio, is all about: it aims to be a one‑stop shop for a range of really synthetic, processed treatments, including hard tuning.

Plug‑in formats are VST, VST3, AU and AAX, and you’ll need to be running at least macOS 10.11 or Windows 10. Humanoid is an audio effect plug‑in with an optional MIDI input, so most serious DAWs will be able to access all its features. The interface and style seems ideally suited to the iPad too, but there’s no word on a version for that OS just yet.

Human Behaviour

Fire up the plug‑in and you’re met with a modern, continuously resizeable single‑window design, and the five user interface panels give a strong indication of what effects are on offer.

Pitch is Humanoid’s take on Auto‑Tune and works in a few different ways. Scale mode is conventional, detecting the pitch of incoming monophonic audio and bending it to a quantised scale degree. Preset scales and an interactive keyboard graphic are provided to let you choose your desired notes. In Note mode pitch is constrained to a single pitch drone, or in Duo mode a pair in parallel, across a five‑octave range. MIDI mode lets you route into the plug‑in live or DAW track‑based MIDI data to ‘play’ the pitch correction, and it’s five‑note polyphonic too, making for a vocoder/harmoniser‑like experience. MIDI pitch‑bend is respected, to the tune of ±2 semitones, but neither velocity nor aftertouch (let alone MPE) is observed, which is a shame. Finally a Lock option lets you maintain settings here even when exploring other presets.

Under‑the‑hood ‘calibration’ parameters, shown here for the Robotify knob, allow for a deeper dive when required.Under‑the‑hood ‘calibration’ parameters, shown here for the Robotify knob, allow for a deeper dive when required.For each mode there’s a small handful of parameters, but it’s worth noting immediately that pitch correction is always ‘on’ even when all controls are turned down. The Quantize knob would then seem to be a sort of macro, adding artificiality by increasing retuning speed and clamping down on pitch fluctuations. Nearby there’s a familiar Formant twister, and also an intriguing ‘Robotify’ knob. This conforms the harmonic series of the input signal to a mathematical ideal, but also boosts upper harmonics to create an unnatural but not unpleasant plastic, zingy, almost cute quality.

Throughout Humanoid more nuanced control is available for parameters that have a ‘cog’ button: clicking one in the Pitch section for example accesses up to four ‘calibration options’, which are really additional parameters in their own right. So there’s a nice balance here of immediacy and depth: you can do a lot of damage with just a few mouse drags, or spend longer to really explore the effect. The same is true of the Utility panel,...

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