12, Jan, 2025
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Intel Play Computer Sound Morpher

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It may look like something out of a Buck Rogers serial, but the Intel Sound Morpher won’t help you repel alien invasions. Despite the Sound Morpher’s high-tech appearance, it is just an average microphone designed for kids.
To be more accurate, the Sound Morpher appears to have been designed to look cool to kids; actual use by kids may not have been planned for. The Sound Morpher connects to the PC through a standard microphone line in, and from there Intel’s software takes over. The microphone can be run connected to the PC or separately, but either way it requires three AAA batteries — and as with all kid’s toys, batteries are not included.
Sound pickup from the microphone is poor. Despite the futuristic-looking microphone hood, you need to be very close to the unit to be picked up at all. The Sound Morpher is capable of four minutes of recording time, which isn’t bad when you break it into soundbites. APC was impressed at how extremely fast sound files could be transferred to the PC. The Morpher feels flimsy, especially around the microphone head, and while Intel didn’t supply any kids for us to test it on, it seems likely that they’d quickly break it.
The other half of the package is the software, which is designed to look ‘cool’ — lots of liquid morphing effects between application screens and the like.
The software has simple sound editing functions. The sound editing stage allows effects to be added to sounds. These are labelled as Alien, Rubber Band and so on, and are basically simple sound effects such as echoes, reverberation and increased or decreased pitch. Sounds can be cut up and moved around, but the lack of documentation made this a little mystifying at first. A bunch of stock sounds are also included: explosions, laughter, toilets flushing, basically anything that could be used to create a cartoon. There’s also the option to create ‘faces’. They try to speak the sound lines as best they can, which is very badly, but they offer some amusement along the way. Files can be saved as simple WAV files, or with facial animations as executables.

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Microphones

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