TOS Communicator Build

Roger that, I will just sit back and enjoy the show.
Fox Tv Popcorn GIF by The Four
 
Will you offer the fx working shells?
If you mean the hollow ones, yes - My plan is to incorporate all of those into the original model on CGTrader. I'm currently wrestling with how to put all of the files into the same package without making it confusing - there are so many alternate parts depending on how it's built - the assembly instructions are going to be crazy. I think I'll have to have multiple PDFs - one for solid, one for hollow, one for the moire assembly
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This may be common knowledge (I am certainly no expert), but while documenting and examining the many varied communicator chirps in TOS, I discovered that almost all of them are spliced out of a single 10-chirp sequence. This actually makes a lot of sense. The sound is an only slightly modified recording of an owl chirping, and there is so much variety that I can't imagine they would have relied on multiple recording sessions with a wild animal, especially considering the relatively primitive state of audio editing/processing in 1966.

I found a few sequences that were probably spliced from a different segment of the recording, but almost all of them (at least from the first season) originated in that main sequence. I've identified & confirmed 20 unique patterns so far, all from the same source. The chirps pulled from episodes look a little "fuzzy" - this is from background noise, music, talking, etc. Not only to the timings line up, but they're really obviously the same when listening to these segments side-by-side with their corresponding segment from the 10-chirp.

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I was fully expecting to have to scrounge for the cleanest clips I could find throughout the series and do a bunch of splicing on a chirp-by-chirp basis just to get close, but nope! The 10-chirp sequence was made available absolutely clean on the licensed "Star Trek Sound Effects" album, and can be downloaded as "TOS Chirp 1" from TrekCore. This is going to make it way easier than I expected to build a good sounding and accurate "chirp library" for random playback via microcontroller/DFPlayer in my communicator.

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I put together a short video to better demonstrate what I was talking about above with the whole communicator "chirp splicing" thing. It amazes me both that they went to so much trouble to make the chirp sequences different from each other as well as how many unique sounding patterns can be pulled from this single set of 10 chirps

 
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