For over the past one-hundred years or so, technology has played a particularly significant role in transforming the social perceptions of music. As is evident by the research conducted during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, vocal music is not exempt from this transformation. In the realm of popular music, the frequent utilization of artificial vocality through devices such as the voice encoder (or vocoder, as is it more commonly referred to), Talk Box and others has frequently served as cause for debate among contemporary musicologists and Pop culture specialists alike. These have become especially intriguing when one considers aspects of gender and race in this form of vocal music.
These next few posts will explore the impact of artificial vocality on contemporary popular vocal music in relation to the latter two parameters. They are not intended to be an exhaustive study of the topic, as they will focus primarily on the vocoder. My research will briefly provide historical background information regarding the origin of the vocoder and its initial intended use. I will, then, discuss its function in terms of musical capabilities. Although the vocoder (and similar devices) requires a fair comprehension of mathematic and scientific principles, this paper will attempt to refrain from using excessive technical jargon so as to not deviate from the main topic. Lastly, this paper will examine three contemporary popular music performers (American R&B/Soul artist Stevie Wonder, British singer/songwriter Imogen Heap and French Techno duo Daft Punk) and their distinct approaches to artificial vocality in their music.
Background Information: Origins and Overall Function
With regards to uncovering details about the vocoder and artificial vocality, several problems quickly arise. From a historical perspective, much of the extant information about this machine often consists of conflicting details or incorrect assumptions. These factual discrepancies particularly range from the official date of the vocoder’s inception, to who created it. What is equally puzzling is that, in recent studies of this device, some musicologists and researchers have tended to couple discussions of other electronic music gadgets with the vocoder: perhaps, because these earlier versions produced similar aural effects.
General descriptions concerning how the vocoder functions (in relation to music and other fields of study) produce similarly unhelpful results. Research conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s has approached the machine (specifically the phase vocoder[1]) and aspects of artificial vocality[2] in terms of science and mathematical analyses. Yet, the authors simultaneously complicate matters by introducing technical jargon, which obscures the clarity of their points. Unless one has studied the subtleties of music technology, such information is difficult to understand.
British musicologist Kay Dickson provides an interesting, albeit convoluted and flawed, examination of the vocoder in terms of gender appropriation. By focusing on its supposed use by Cher in her 1998 hit song “Believe.” the author argues that an influx of female and queer pop musicians have harnessed the creative potential of the vocoder in their songs. Unfortunately, two current developments have marred the credibility of Dickson’s research. The first stems from its historical inaccuracies. The author claims that this device “… was created in 1939 in Germany as a means of disguising military voice transmissions.”[3] To a certain extent, this statement is partially true. It is correct that the vocoder had been utilized for militaristic purposes at first. Yet, Dickson neglects to mention other crucial pieces of information (which will be examined shortly). The second problem stems from the fact that Cher does not use a vocoder at all in “Believe.” It has now been proven that this song actually used the Auto Tune pitch-adjusting software program (which is often mistaken for the vocoder) during the recording process.[4]
Slightly more current information presented by the pop and hip-hop specialist Dave Tompkins reveals a cornucopia of striking differences in details. First, although the author acknowledges the experimentation of the vocoder in Germany during the 1930s, he also quickly points out that its use in that country existed three years prior to 1939.[5] Secondly, he credits the American scientist Homer Dudley of AT&T’s Bell Labs for initially concocting the device. According to Tompkins, the idea for the machine occurred to Dudley rather spontaneously. He conceived of it “… when he realized his mouth was a radio station while flat on his back in a Manhattan hospital bed …. It was October 1928, a year before the stock market fell on its head….”[6]
The last sentence of this quote is especially telling because it pushes the origin of the vocoder back in time by nine years. Furthermore, when Dudley premiered the vocoder during the 1930s, most notably, at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, he and his team had originally called his invention the Voder: an abbreviation which stood for “… Voice Operating DEmonstratoR….”[7] As Tompkins notes, however, this prototype also elicited a series of problems during its first demonstration. In order to articulate speech, the Voder had to be manipulated manually. The author elaborates on this process:
…. For all its gimmickry, the Voder was difficult to manage, a male persona played by women, whose voices were considered too high-pitched to be recognized by the vocoder itself. Only trained telephone operators, disembodied voices on the switchboard, had the hand-ear coordination to give the machine the social skills to work, a sort of remedial Speak & Spell. A simple phrase (“I am not wearing a bear suit”) called for deft key and foot-pedal movements. Intelligibility proved to be a challenge when machines weren’t expected to speak in the first place, much less speak in Latin.[8]
It should additionally be said that Homer Dudley did not originally perceive the vocoder as a tool for the military. On the contrary, he had sought to incorporate its use in the filming industry. [9] How, then, did the vocoder acquire a reputation (at least, at first) as a part of World War II technology? The answer to this question lies in its purpose and function at that particular time (1939-1945). As mentioned previously, the machine had been used primarily for encoding speech. While Dickson and Tompkins both agree on this purpose, the similarities end there. Based on Tompkins’ research of now-declassified information, the vocoder’s role during World War II involved a partnership between British and American military intelligence agencies and diplomats. More specifically, cryptologists and scientists worked together to encode speech patterns in order to prevent Hitler’s Nazi army from retrieving valuable information in advance. The vocder became equally necessary in this regard because, prior to its use, Germany had already seized control of the Trans-Atlantic cable (which simplified the process of eavesdropping).[10]
In order to maintain secrecy, the British and American Military devised the speech-scrambling tool known as SIGSALY, or Project X as it was referred to by the United States. Thompkins indicates that, to thwart further attempts by the Nazis, the scientists involved in creating the wide and bulky device (about the size of a wall) had intended for the SIGSALY acronym to be fake. [11] Another intriguing factor about SIGSALY stems from how the encoded speech got recorded. The multitude of conversations had to be synchronized in real time on especially-designed aluminum records. For security purposes, these records (which featured only one recordable side) had to be used once and were immediately destroyed afterward.[12]
Based on the information presented, it is unusual that the vocoder and similar technological devices have been used for music. It would be erroneous, however, to assume that such tools existed solely in the latter–half of the twentieth century. The dates for some of these inventions, coincidentally, overlap in time. Aside from the vocoder, other contraptions that emphasized artificial vocality had been created before 1950: the Electrolayrynx (an artificial voice-box created by Homer Dudley’s assistant scientist R. R. Riesz in the mid-1920s[13]) and the Sonovox (developed by Gilbert Wright in 1939, which had originally been used for radio advertisements[14]). It is ironic that the latter device was developed the same year that Dudley had introduced the Voder (vocoder) at the World’s Fair. In Wright’s case, he created the Sonovox by accident “… while grazing the shadow on his neck with an electric razor.”[15]
Footnotes
[1] Rajmil Fischman. “The phase vocoder: theory and practice,” Organised Sound, Vol. 2 (2) (August 1997), 127-145. http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355771897009060 (accessed March 14, 2014); M. –H. Serra. “Introducing the phase vocoder,” in Musical Signal Processing, Curtis Roads et. Al (Ed.) (Lisse, Netherlands, Exton, PA: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 1997), 31-90.
[2] Bruno Bossis. “Reflections on the analysis of artificial vocality: representations, tools and prospective.” Organised Sound, Vol. 9 (1) (April 2004), 91-98. http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355771804000123 (accessed March 29, 2014).
[3] Kay Dickson, “ ‘Believe’? Vocoders, digitalized female identity and camp.” Popular Music, Vol. 20 (3), Gender and Sexuality, (Oct. 2001), pp. 333-347. http://www.jstor.org/stable/853625 (accessed March 15, 2014).
[4] Sue Sillitoe and Matt Bell, “Recording Cher.” Sound on Sound (February 1999). http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb99/articles/tracks661.htm (accessed April 12, 2014).
[5]Dave Tompkins, “Chapter One: Nearly Enough like That Which Gave Them Birth,” in How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks. (Chicago: StopSmiling Books, 2010), 40.
[6] Ibid., 48.
[7] Ibid., 37.
[8] Ibid., 38.
[9] Ibid., 49.
[10] Dave Tompkins. “Chapter Two: Indestructible Speech,” How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks. (Chicago: StopSmiling Books, 2010), 55.
[11] Ibid., 60.
[12] Ibid., 64-73.
[13] Dave Tompkins. “Chapter Six: The Sacred Thunder Croak,” How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks. (Chicago: StopSmiling Books, 2010), 128.
[14] Ibid. 130-131.
[15] Ibid., 130.