The Origins of the Vocoder: From the Military to Disco and Beyond

[Bernie]

Check out this story about the history of the vocoder and how it was initially a device intended for use by the U.S. Military during WWII.

The Vocoder: From Speech-Scrambling To Robot Rock

From Military Base To Music Studio

The vocoder experienced a major transition from military device to musical effect when Wendy Carlos used it on the soundtrack for 1971's A Clockwork Orange. Carlos did a vocoder interpretation of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Tompkins says exposed the vocoder in unprecedented ways.

"Essentially, that introduced the vocoder to its first major audience," he says. "A lot people had no idea what it was. As the vocoder evolved, they knew the voice but had no idea where it came from."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...88&sc=fb&cc=fp

[Videoskooter]

Very interesting article but like so much Dance and Disco music, the roots go so much further than the 70's. Techno and Electro, they all borrowed heavily from European composers like Pierre Henry, Jean-Jaques Perrey and even much further back, Edgar Varèse!

Lectro, Trip Hop, whatever, let's face it! Take a listen (okay, you can hardly listen to this) and you know where Kraftwerk, Moroder and so many more took their inspiration from. The pic of the album is from 1973 but, attention, this was originally composed in 1950!

And Pink Floyd? Take a listen to this from the mid-sixties and open your eyes!

[Videoskooter]

And Munich Machine?? Listen to this, mmmmmh! The Electronic Concept Orchestra!

[Disco Funk]

I don't hear any vocoder on that Electronic Concept Orchestra track. They were known for their Moog recordings, which is the synthesizer I hear on that clip.

For dance music, Transeurope Express by Kraftwerk and From Here To Eternity by Munich Machine are the earliest uses. But they don't use them musically, not significantly, at least.

I think it was Herbie Hancock who used it to it's most interesting effect in I Thought It Was You, then Zapp would do it further in the 80s.

Disco Funk

[remicks]

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why was I waiting for those charging horse to flail mud all over her .....




I must be evil.



******

[JussiK]

That Jericho Jerk track is priceless, vocoders or no. Henry's Machine Danse from 1973 is also outstanding, already 4/4 dance music as we know it today. There's no clip at Youtube but at Discoqs, someone puts it well: Mindblowing electronic session from 1973 with the Killer DJ cut 'Machine Danse' with funky beats & oddball electronic splashes! There are some very dark & otherworldly tracks like 'Exorcisme' & 'Sacrafice' & hypnotic minimal grooves featuring afro percussion with tripped out sounds fresh from Mr Henry's modular synth like 'Tam tam de la source'! inspirational stuff, not just a collection of bleeps, drones & swooshes like so many music concrete LPs".
The below tune also has no vocoders so I'm off topic, but while we're discussing the more interesting wtf-style disco stuff, do check it out!

[Videoskooter]

That Jericho Jerk track is priceless, vocoders or no.

Indeed it is! Brilliant Music. BTW, the clips I posted where just a reaction to Bernie's info on the fact that there's nothing new under the sun. The genius of some Disco legends was in assimilating those experiments and adding something new to it. In other words, to make it useful for the standard listeners. They were just taking it a step further. People like Edgar Varèse and Pierre Henry (to name just a few) were the true pioneers of what has become Lectro, Techno, Trance and even Progressive Rock.

Last night I saw a rockumentary on Pink Floyd where the members revealed where their stuff originated from (even Miles Davis) and where recording engineer Alan Parsons and the Floyds showed how some legendary stuff was recorded. It was devastating...interesting! Vocoders, oscillators, multi-track layers, all you can dream of. In some songs they wanted to use so many multi-tracks that the whole band and the engineers had to control all the knobs since BITD the studio equipment wasn't sufficient enough to record their ideas in the way they wanted. Parsons said that the recording of some songs really had to be rehearsed like a live concert and that with all the digital witchcraft from nowadays a form of art had dissapeared.

That's the point I wanted to make here, for vocoder stuff you can read a zillion threads on this board.