Hello, I just found about about Houdini. I'm interested in transferring to Houdini from a Cycling74 Max patch.

The patch changes the color of material regions on a ‘dalek’ object when a voice rises above a particular level from a mic input, so that the dalek's eye flashes on and
off. The cycling74 patch also vocodes the voice input, which I show in the attached image.

In Houdini, how would I import a voice file and set it up to modulate a light?

You would use CHOPs.

Here is a tutorial video that should give you an idea of how the whole thing works:

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/audio-driven-animation-1/ [www.sidefx.com]

CHOPs also supports MIDI - so if your max patch can send midi you can use that to drive whatever you'd like

Gee that's great, thanks guys! This will be fun, Im looking forward to it