PIPE
USER MANUAL
WHAT IS THE PIPE?
The Soma PIPE adds new expressive and musical dimensions to your vocal performances
and studio recordings, and expands the timbral, rhythmical and textural potential of your
voice — treating it as a synthesizing musical instrument with many subtle parameters.
Whether you’re a conventional singer, beatboxer, noise musician or an experimental
vocalist, the PIPE will add new layers to your music that you never knew existed.
The PIPE makes you a beatboxer without needing any prior skills (although some sense
of rhythm will help), and you can sound like a Tibetan throat singer just as easily. Turn
your voice into a synthesizer with frequency cut-off that you tweak on the fly, or connect
any external sound source to the 6.3mm jack input to turn the PIPE into an external FX
processor. The custom-built mic inside the PIPE is a special contact mic, which yields very
interesting results when used together with acoustic instruments. Bottom-line, the PIPE
is unlike anything you have ever played, because nothing like it exists.
Out of all the music instruments we can learn to use, our own voice is the most deeply
connected to our innermost thoughts and emotions. This connection was born hundreds
of millions of years before humanity fully evolved.
Our voice is the shortest path to the depths of our subconsciousness. In music, the human
voice typically appears in the form of words, usually limited to common vocalizations,
and only rarely as the means for pure emotional and timbral expression. Although the
PIPE can be used for conventional singing and speaking, it is ultimately designed to offer
new expressive powers for a voice beyond words and symbolic thinking. The PIPE makes
it possible to create a versatile sound palette without knob tweaking, by just using the
natural flexibility of the human voice box and our instinctive connection to it.
The PIPE can be used by masters of classical singing styles, as well as by experimental
musicians who may not be good singers in the conventional sense. Drones and noise
textures up to harsh noise, various percussive sounds, melodic leads, choirs, FX, bass — all
this can be achieved using different articulation techniques and processing algorithms.
The PIPE consists of a special vocal contact microphone in a controller and processing unit
that’s connected by cable to a breakout box containing the power supply and audio output.
The contact mic dramatically expands the palette of vocal techniques. A unique feature of
the mic is that it is highly sensitive to the position of the lips relative to the membrane, and
also how tight the contact between lips and mic is. A tiny movement of a few millimeters or
degrees can drastically change the timbre. The microphone picks up sounds that traditional
mics never could. This sensitivity allows artists to control the sound to create a wide range
of timbres. With your lips pressed tightly against it, the microphone is able to catch the
most subtle sounds of breathing, along with any movements of your lips and tongue. At
the same time, the microphone has a robust brass membrane that can withstand a lot of
punishment. This allows for intense vocal techniques without the risk of damaging the
microphone. You can beatbox or blow straight into the mic to get distinct percussive or
noise sounds. Due to the way it’s designed, the PIPE microphone is much more than just
a receiver and transmitter of sound. It also plays an active part in the shaping of sounds.
When used in certain ways, the microphone can play even bigger role than your voice.
The heart of the processing unit is a digital signal processor equipped with unique algorithms
created specifically for the PIPE. The main goal of the algorithms is to both preserve and
Summary of Contents for PIPE
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