Mobile Talkbox

The Mobile Talkbox is a 3D-printable attachment for the LG G3 Vigor. It slips on like a case and routes the phone’s speaker audio through a tube to your mouth. On its own like this, it pairs nicely with the Pocket Talkbox app. You can also attach a fretboard to the the arms. Here’s what each of those options sound like:

To get the acoustic instrument’s sound into your mouth, you’ll need to attach a piezo or pickup to an 1/8″ mono out jack (looks like this) which you’ll plug into a headset splitter that ultimately goes into your phone. Using MobMuPlat and SoundAbout, you can create a distortion patch in pure data and bypass your headset splitter to send the audio out through the speaker. Here are the MobMuPlat and pure data files I’m using in the video.

You’ll notice the plucked sound doesn’t filter as well as the Pocket Talkbox app. That’s because the distortion I’m applying through the pure data patch isn’t great. Also, there’s a very noticeable delay between my acoustic pluck and the pluck that comes through my phone. Looking ahead, I’d like to fix this, isolate the sound to the tube, and incorporate the phone screen in some way. The screen is begging to be used!

MobileTalkbox.stl | MobileTalkbox.3dm