FEATURE:
Music Technology Breakthroughs
Part Five: The Vocoder
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IN today’s music scene…
there is something ubiquitous about the vocoder. It is almost an elemental part of the landscape; no less for many modern Pop artists. Some say that the vocoder is a piece of technology that is overused and false. Artists can use it to alter their voices and disguise a pretty ropey singing performance! It is unfair to say the vocoder has just been used by Pop artists to manipulate their voices and hide a definite weakness. Across multiple genres, it has played a huge part. Whether it is as a sort of sound effect or used to produce a vocal that you cannot get from a human being, the vocoder was a massive turning point – it has been used by so many musicians through the years. In this fascinating article, we learn more about the background to the vocoder and how it came into popular music:
“The vocoder didn’t actually start life as a musical instrument. Instead, in the 1920s, Homer Dudley at Bell Labs created a device whose function was to make it easier to transmit telephone conversations over long distances by reducing bandwidth. The design of the vocoder broke speech (as an input signal) down into multiple bands, retaining only those necessary for speech intelligibility. This lower-frequency transmission allowed telephone conversations to remain audible, while requiring significantly less copper wire than a full-frequency equivalent, thus increasing bandwidth.
This technology was quickly pounced upon by the military, and an enhanced version of it was used to scramble transatlantic conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt during the second world war.
Fundamentally, successful use of a vocoder requires a blending of two sources, the first of which is usually a human voice, which is called the Modulator. It provides an input signal which is broken down into a number of bands (as per Bell Labs’ original design) using filters running in series. There’s also the Carrier, the synthesizer component of the vocoder, which substitutes a traditional Oscillator stage by using a frequency analysis of the Modulator as an audio trigger. In other words, singing into a microphone and then playing keys on the vocoder will trigger the pitches played, producing a multi-voiced, harmonized, and otherworldly performance interpretation of the words and notes you sing”.
In the early 1970s, Moog developed a vocoder with Walter (later Wendy) Carlos for the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, while the late 1970s and early 1980s represented the vocoder’s heyday, with artists such as ELO (“Mr. Blue Sky,” 1977) and Kraftwerk (“The Robots,” 1978) popularizing its sound”.
It’s the desire to produce unnatural sounds that has led successive generations of musicians to the vocoder, but it’s by no means the only technology that has proved popular in this regard. For instance, think about pure synthetic voices that use no audio input signal but generate words artificially instead. Computer voices like this allowed Stephen Hawking to disseminate some of the most important scientific ideas of the last 50 years.
I will finish up soon, but I want to end with a snippet from a featured from Roland. They discuss the history of the Roland vocoder and look at the difference between the vocoder and something called a talkbox – a piece of kit that has been used in many well-known songs:
In a musical context, Radiohead’s “Fitter, Happier” from the iconic 1997 album OK Computer provides a detached lead vocal computer voice, perfect for the automaton nature of the song. On a more upbeat note, consider Bruno Mars’ smash hit single “24k Magic” which starts with Mr. Talkbox using, as you might expect, a Talkbox, to produce a multi-harmony soul introduction. And, of course, the hyper-tuned effect heard on pop records since Cher’s “Believe” pioneered the effect nearly 20 years ago, has drifted in and out of fashion ever since”.
“Roland’s first vocoder was the VP-330. It was used by many artists, perhaps most notably by Vangelis for the Blade Runner soundtrack, and is known as one of the most popular vocoders ever made.
It was a 10-band vocoder, which is limited by today’s standards, but gives it a classic sound. The vocoder sound was enhanced by an Ensemble effect. It also had Strings and Human Voice (Choir) sounds, that could be either blended with the vocoder or used on their own.
The sound of this classic vocoder is now available in Boutique format in the VP-03
A talkbox has a similar sound to a vocoder, but the effect is achieved in a different manner. Sound is sent into one end of a tube. The other end is placed in the musician’s mouth. The harmonics of the sound coming out of the tube are shaped and filtered by the musician’s mouth.
This technique was used by many musicians, including Peter Frampton, Bon Jovi and Pink Floyd. A similar sounding effect is included in the VO-1 Vocoder pedal. An example is shown in the first clip of the video below.
I think the vocoder has got a bad rap from some because it has been used in songs to add something to a bad vocal and, after Cher released Believe, I think we saw it come into music more – there was a time where the vocoder was very overused. If you think about the impact it has had on music and the songs where a vocoder features, it is quite amazing! Whatever you think about the technology and its usage in music, one cannot help deny the fact that it is…
QUITE a game-changer.
