Turn a clean voice recording into a hard-edged, boxy megaphone or bullhorn shout — the kind of sound you'd get shouting through a handheld bullhorn or a stadium megaphone horn. This is our narrowest, most aggressive preset: a tight honk-band filter stacked with a near-square-wave clip, tuned to actually screech instead of just getting louder.
Where People Use the Megaphone Effect
The megaphone preset gets reached for whenever a voice needs to sound like it's coming through a small, cheap horn driver instead of a clean microphone:
Video and short-form content — dropping a "bullhorn voice" moment into a TikTok, Reel, or YouTube short for comedic emphasis or a fake public-announcement gag.
Protest, rally, and activism skits — recreating the shouted, distorted cadence of a real bullhorn address for a scene, sketch, or reenactment.
Sports chants and crowd hype clips — punching up a chant leader's voice or a hype-man line so it cuts through like it's coming off a handheld megaphone at a game.
Halloween, robot, and "old speaker" character voices — the narrow band and hard clip double as a cheap stand-in for a broken intercom, a haunted-house speaker, or a robotic announcer voice when you don't have a dedicated vocoder.
How The Megaphone Effect Actually Works
This isn't reverb or an echo effect — the megaphone preset barely uses any room sound at all (0.3 seconds of reverb tail, mixed in at just 32%). Almost all of the character comes from narrow-band filtering and hard clipping:
A narrow 1,000–2,400 Hz passband. Everything below 1 kHz and above 2.4 kHz is cut, collapsing your voice down to the same slice of the spectrum a small horn driver can reproduce — no low-end body, no crisp top end.
A 3-stage filter cascade. That passband isn't a single gentle roll-off; the high-cut and low-cut filters are each run in series three times, steepening both edges to roughly 18 dB per octave so the band sounds genuinely narrow and boxy instead of just "duller."
A resonant peak boosted at 1,500 Hz. Before distortion runs, a narrow slice of the signal centered on 1.5 kHz is pulled out and boosted back in, concentrating more of the waveform's energy right where the next stage clips hardest — this is what gives the honk its "peaky," almost buzzy edge rather than a flat crunch.
Hard clipping at 95% distortion. The pre-shaped signal is pushed through a tanh saturation stage at 0.95 out of a possible 1.0 — close enough to a full clip that the waveform is squared off rather than just warmed up, which is what produces the actual screech/rasp instead of a mild PA-radio coloration.
Megaphone Effect FAQ
Is this the same as adding reverb or echo?
Reverb and echo add repeated or trailing copies of the sound; the megaphone effect barely uses reverb at all. The megaphone character comes almost entirely from cutting the frequency band down to 1,000–2,400 Hz and then clipping the result hard.
Will it work on any voice recording?
A dry, close-mic'd recording with minimal background noise gives the clearest result, since the narrow band and hard clip will emphasize whatever is already in that 1–2.4 kHz range, including hiss or hum.
Can I make it less extreme?
After applying the Megaphone preset, open Step 4's fine-tune panel and lower the Distortion slider or widen the High Cut / Low Cut range for a softer, less clipped bullhorn tone.
Is my audio uploaded anywhere?
Every step — filtering, the resonant peak, and the distortion stage — runs locally in your browser using the Web Audio API. Nothing is sent to a server.