compress your voice

THE ORIGINS:

For the longest time, I looked at old video games and one thing they had in common was this weird compressed audio. I wanted to figure out exactly how to do it. I started with sample-wise compression, and that didn't provide the results I wanted. Then I did bit-wise compression, which was close, but not what I wanted. I then wondered what would happen if I reversed certain chunks of audio, and surprisingly, it produced the effect! Note,this isn't really compression, but it does feel like it. If you're wondering, compression means crunching something to save space, which isn't happening here, for the most part.


HOW IT WORKS:

You select a compression rate (the higher the number, the more compression). You then record a piece of audio. To make the project go faster, the audio is compressed sample-wise by half. So 44100 Hz audio will be 22050 Hz. The samples are then chunked (meaning they are just grouped into smaller lists) depending on the compression rate. The chunks are then reversed. I had to make sure that the chunk lists were reversed, not the order of the chunks. Otherwise, this will produce reversed audio. The chunks are then flattened to produce the final sound.