Vocoder: Magic mic

Hey, it's David Pierce here. Before we get into it, just a reminder to go subscribe to ersionhistory podcast on Instagram TikTok and YouTube versionhistorypodcast. That's where all of our episodes are. That's where all of our social clips are gonna be. We have huge plans for what we're gonna do in these places. So go subscribe. Enjoy the show.

0:00

Oh, yeah. All I'm doing is shaping the sound with my mouth.

0:17

Yeah.

0:23

In the 1930s, a researcher at Bell Labs discovered that not only could he record the human voice in really high quality, he could play it like an instrument. Who saw you? She saw me.

0:27

Whom did she see?

0:38

She saw me. And the thing that he made called the vocoder, would not only be crucially important in winning a war, it would change the music industry forever. From the virgin Vox Media, this is version history, A show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history. I'm David Pearce, and today we're making music.

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Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat. All right, we're back. Let's talk vocoder. Joining me in the studio, Charlie Harding. Welcome to the show.

2:06

Thanks for having me.

2:15

You have. We've done a bunch of stuff together over the years. You have listened to me complain about Auto Tune many times. We call you the Vergecast Music intern. You host the show Switched On Pop. You are a professor of music and you know I would say an awful lot about the vocoder. Is that fair to say?

2:16

I know a little bit, yeah.

2:32

And just to introduce our guests here, they're not gonna brag about themselves. We have Chromio here with us. For the listeners or the viewers who don't know, tell us a little bit about Chromio before we let them talk about themselves. Oh.

2:34

Chromio are the masters of synthesis, of funky grooves of music that makes you inherently need to move. And they do it using some of the great old technologies of the past, like the vocoder. They use a lot of the Talkbox. Probably one of the most fun shows that you can possibly go see.

2:45

Love it. All right, joining us from Los Angeles, Dave and P. Welcome to the show.

3:07

Hey. Hey.

3:11

Hello.

3:12

Thank you both for being here. So before we get too far into it, just for anyone who doesn't know, give me the most basic top line definition of a vocoder. Just so we know going in.

3:12

Okay. So a vocoder is an instrument that has two parts. One part is a synthesizer, and the other part is your voice. And your voice is gonna get sent through that synthesizer. It's gonna get encoded and re encoded. Hence the vocoder. Yeah, yeah, Voice encoder. And it's going to sort of simplify the sound of your voice down to its fundamental sounds. The vowel sounds, the. The consonants. But none of the pitches, all the pitches are gonna come from the synthesizer that you're playing it through. And it's gonna be somewhat unintelligible, it's gonna be somewhat eerie, but it's gonna be very enticing. And it's gonna make you feel like you belong in a 1970s sci fi.

3:23

I love it. And we should say right up here at the top, because a thing that I've learned is that people will yell at you if you get this wrong. We're gonna talk a lot on this show about the vocoder and auto tune and the Talkbox and other similar technologies. And I want everyone to know that none of us think those are the same thing. No, but they are all you would say of a kind. There's some commonality in terms of how we manipulate our voice.

4:04

They're fundamentally different technologies that came from different periods of time. Their architecture could not be more different. And yet the perceived effect as listeners is like, oh, the voice sounds different. It sounds somewhat robotic, it sounds unnatural. It sounds enticing.

4:27

Okay. A thing I was wondering is I feel like every musician I talk to has some, like, the first time I picked up a guitar story or like, my parents made me take piano lessons. And there's always some important turning moment in the life of some instrument for people. Do you guys have that with a vocoder?

4:45

I'll set the scene and then pee will take it from here. Because this is like sort of a foundational myth of our band.

5:05

Oh, I love it.

5:11

So we. We will discuss later on the nuances and differences between Talkbox and VOC order and Autotune. And Autotune. But our first love was Talkbox, right? And that. That was the first thing we sort of fell in love with. P and I were kids in Canada, Montreal, Canada, discovering funk music at the same time as rap music. So we had the source material and the sampled material that was coming to us that we were getting familiar with at the same exact time. So same time as, you know, we're listening to California Love and Snoop Doggy Style and so on. We're also listening to More Bounce to the Ounce and. And all the Zappin Roger stuff on the same level, on the same plane.

5:11

No hierarchy. Like it's. No, we're ingesting everything.

5:51

Because being that we have immigrant parents, no one's. No one was listening to funk at home. So we didn't have a sense of chronology. And when you actually listen to them back to back. More Bounce to the Ounce and Kraftwerk sounds just as modern as Dr. Dre anyway. So it's. We didn't really have a hierarchy between the two. We loved both and we listened to both. So then we have a little high school band and we were playing funk music and incorporating hip hop elements and so on and so forth. And then one day, like we're 15 years old and P shows up to band practice with a homemade crazy contraption. And that was the first time P had invented his or created his own talk box.

5:55

Built my own talk box.

6:40

Take it from there, Pete.

6:41

So we just. I mean, the. The part where we discover. And we're like, okay, we're obsessed with this was we discover Zap and More

6:43

Bounce to the Ounce.

6:51

More Bounce to the Ounce. Roger Trotman. Just like everybody else, we're like, what is this voice? Is this a vocoder? Is this the Talk Box? Autotune wasn't around back then. But we're as confused as everybody. So I start doing my research as a 15 year old nerd. I figure it out slowly but surely. I'm like, there's a tube. So it's not a mic. It's not like this. It's not like that thing. Long story short, I figure out that it's called the Talk Box. Trying to find a Talk Box in 1995 in Montreal was the hardest thing ever. It was way before the revival and like companies actually started remanufacturing talk boxes by then it was a dead instrument.

6:52

But parentheses Montreal 90s still felt like New York in the 80s, so hair metal was alive and well, and we could still go to the local music store. And nobody knew, like, the local guitar store. Nobody knew what Zapp or cared for. Zap. Daft Punk and. And Tupac, California love, but they love Peter Frampton and Bon Jovi.

7:38

Bon Jovi, Okay.

8:02

So P Had an in.

8:03

Yeah. He was like, what is this thing? Oh, yeah, that's a. That's a talk box. I'm like, where can I find one? And everybody laughs. They're like, well, that thing doesn't exist anymore. It was nowhere to be found. So. And I had a friend in high school who was a bit of a electronics geek.

8:04

There's always one.

8:23

Yeah, there's always one. He was like, music electronics geek. He gifted me a project book with guitar pedals, how to build your own guitar pedals. And every page was a different effect. So you could build your own phaser, you know, like, filter, whatever, delay. One of the pages was a talk box. So I had schematics for a talk box, and I decided to build my talk box because I couldn't find it anywhere. So it started, you know, I literally built, like, a little wooden thing, a little wooden box with a speaker, with an amp, and I walked around with a contraption that looked like. You know, it was.

8:24

It was sad because he came to band practice and, like, I was the one that had to break it to him. Like, it doesn't sound good, bro. I can kind of see what you're trying to do, but it's not sounding right. But he. This is like, we were, you know, children, like teenagers, and that's how he started it. And really, even though I think, like, it's fair to say, P, that it kind of. Then I think off of that first slight defeat, you went back to the lab, and in the privacy, I was.

9:05

I was developing my prototype.

9:34

Yes.

9:35

I feel like if I've learned one thing about the vocoder and all associated technologies, it turns out that sounding good is not actually all that important.

9:36

No, it's really tough.

9:43

Well, it's actually hard.

9:44

Even the vocal, by the way, like, it's not. Some vocal. Really don't sound good.

9:45

And then. P. Am I right to say. I mean, this is from my recollection of our. Of childhood and, like, teenage years and so, I guess teenagers again, you know, without resources. We used to listen to songs. So around the World by Daft Punk came out around the same time. California Love and so on. And P. And I used to be like, ooh, that's VOC order. That's Talkbox.

9:51

That.

10:13

First of all, we're French, so we still thought it was VOC order.

10:13

Yeah.

10:16

Probably until, you know, we were 23.

10:17

A lot of people did. Don't feel bad. I've learned that a lot of people did for a long time.

10:19

And so we were like, this is Talkbox. No, this is more vocal. No, Dave, this is VOC order. Oh, really? That's not like Roger. No, Dave, it's VOC order. Kraftwerk is VOC orders, not Talk Box. Okay, cool. And then, of course, when, you know, Autotune came out, and with Cher being the first song, then we were even more confused. And P was the one who was like, no, this is called Autotune. So we were sort of, you know, trying to figure out what these things were. And because our DNA was a little bit more funk, we always had a bit of a penchant for the talk box. But ever since the first Chromeo album, there's VOC order all over the place. So we've always used the two. And even though P's on stage playing Talkbox, there's vocal on just as many songs from our band.

10:23

And Auto Tune.

11:10

And Auto Tune. Yeah.

11:11

Musicians work so hard and are willing to build pedals from schematics in order to change their voice. It's such a compelling thing to do. I worked a whole summer to buy my first software license of Apple's Logic, their digital audio workstation. And one of the first things I did was like, where's the vocoder plugin? How do I change my voice? There's something so compelling to hear yourself in a new way.

11:12

Totally. All right, so let's. I wanna get into kind of the whole history of where this thing came from. Because this was a really fun episode for me. Cause I knew nothing about this. So I went into the vocoder story, like, dry. And so I am going to be the least knowledgeable person in the room on this. So all of you, please stop me and take things where they need to go. But. So the story, as I understand it, starts in Bell labs in the 1930s with this guy named Homer Dudley, which is an extremely 1930s name. And I love Homer Dudley for this. So Homer Dudley was. He was at Bell Labs, which is part of AT&T. So he's thinking about telephones and phone calls. And his big idea was he wanted to figure out how to compress people's voices so that you could send them over copper telegraph lines, specifically under the water, to the uk. This was like his biggest dream.

11:35

It's the first data compression, which is wild.

12:23

Yeah.

12:26

Basically a vocoder. When you think about it in technical terms, it's pretty much like an MP3 because you start from an analog signal, which is your voice, but then you code your voice into bands. So basically it's sampling at different. At a different level of depending on how many bands you have. It's sampling your voice and it's saying, okay, this band has this much amplitude, meaning volume or gain, and it deconstructs your voice into a very simple compressed manner. That way it's like data. Literally, it's data compression. And then you send the code of which band has what amplitude, and then you send that over because it's. It's easier. It's easier to transmit. And then you reproduce that sound on the other end.

12:26

What do you mean you reproduce that sound on the other end?

13:20

So that's what the role that the synth does. Oh, your voice goes into a coder. Oh, it codes all the bands depending on how many bands you have. And then your synth takes that in and he's like, oh, frequency. Ta da da. Has that much gain. I'm going to apply that to the sound that's being played.

13:22

Pete, can I tell you, I did like 30 hours of research to come up with a much less coherent explanation than you just did right there. But, no, I think that's exactly right. And I think one of the pieces of this. And Charlie, I wonder if I'm going to make you do science class for me for just a quick second, because I just have this suspicion you can do this. A thing that I learned doing this is that going way back, one of the big challenges with. With the telephone lines back in the AT T days was that the human voice is so rich and so complicated that it's actually very hard. That's right. To make into a sort of transmittable thing. And it's because there is just a huge amount happening when we talk very

13:43

complex signal, you know, it's the most complex, I think. Right. Sorry. Do you guys know that book, How Music Became Free? And it talks. It's. It's incredible. And it's about, like, the onset of bootlegging and of MP3s. And they talk about the Journey German lab that invented the. The MP3 file. And apparently the piece of music that they tested and that was the most challenging to code into an MP3 was Suzanne Vega, Tom's Diner. Because it's a human voice, and that's a lot harder to, I guess Convert or encode digitally than a piano or a guitar or a drum set.

14:23

Yeah. Because. Because you have so much going on in. In the human voice and the fluctuations of frequencies and tone and everything.

15:02

Air or whatever that's called. I don't even know.

15:11

Empty space, negative space. Like noise. There's a bit of noise in our voice. Like, there's white noise, there's pink noise, there's a bunch of stuff happening, and it's so complex. And then you have to figure out how to dissect that into a 12 band or like six bands.

15:13

What's a band? When you say, oh, I see a

15:29

band is like frequent a range of frequencies.

15:31

Yes, I understand.

15:34

Right. Because we hear from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. And so you have to subdivide that like, sort of infinite range of spectrum to smaller bands. Because, I mean, I think about the human voice is like a sonic fingerprint. It's something which is completely original to you.

15:35

Right.

15:49

It's one of the amazing things, is that we can pinpoint a friend in a crowd just by hearing their voice. And we are so tuned, our ears are literally tuned to hear the human voice. So it's an incredibly complicated sonic fingerprint.

15:50

Yeah. And so this, Pete, to your point about the MP3 thing, this is one of the things our guy Homer Dudley spends a lot of time working on, is how do I take this massive amount of data and only use the relevant parts? Like, what is the least I can do with all of this data in order to make it transmissible in some way? And spent a ton of time working on, can I lose this frequency and this frequency and have it still be recognizable as a human voice and, like, intelligible. Yeah, exactly. And that actually he had to get it down to almost like a 30th of what it was to do what he needed to do, which was a huge, huge project. Yeah.

16:03

There's a lot of useless things in the voice. If you want to just transmit a message, you only need the sibilances, you need the white noise, you need, you know, you don't need the tone. And. And I think I have a theory about why people love the vocoder and, like, robotic voices so much. It's because you're removing so much of it that it becomes, like, very endearing and childlike and. You know what I mean?

16:39

So it's like more pure, like a purified version.

17:03

You remove all the emotions, but you keep, like, a certain very basic communication. And I think there's something about that that is like, it's like when you hear a vocoder, I hear like a child talking poetry.

17:05

I love that. But to what you're saying, though, there's. There's always something compelling about low fidelity.

17:20

Right.

17:26

Like a black and white photo's got less information than a color photo, a blurry photo, a Polaroid. It's kind of like every time you remove information but you can still read it and guess what's happening, it produces a kind of pleasure.

17:27

I think that's part of it totally.

17:42

So I found a diagram of the way that Homer Dudley imagined this thing. Can I show it to you guys? I think you'll enjoy it. So this, if you can see on the screen, is the first idea of what this might look like.

17:44

His brain is dope.

17:57

That's my favorite part. His diagrams always start with the brain as, like a key part of the equation, which I appreciated. And it was like a philosophical thing for him as, like, these started human things, but you can see it's going through. And it is designed to take out all the parts, like you said, P. That are not useful to carrying a message. Because remember, at this point, this is not. This is not a creative medium. This is a. How do I transmit words very long distances and have them still be intelligible? He builds two things simultaneously. One is the vocoder and one is called the voter, which is kind of. It's explicitly.

17:58

The output voter was like a mechanical device that you performed speech with. You didn't even speak into.

18:32

It was basically like an organ for playing words. Yes, is kind of how I would describe it.

18:38

There were a couple of women who trained for years to be able to play this game.

18:42

Yeah. So he trained a couple dozen women for like a year and a half ahead of the World's Fair in order for them to be able to give these demos over and over and over for people. And here is just one piece of the demo that they did. The machine uses only two sounds produced electrically. One of these represents the breath, the other the vibration of the vocal cords. She's just playing music or anything of that sort. Only electrical circuits such as are used in telephone practice.

18:45

Let's see how you put expression.

19:17

Expression into a sentence. Say she saw me.

19:18

With no expression. She saw me. Now say it in answer to these questions.

19:22

Who saw you? She saw me. Did she see?

19:29

Because there's a pitch bend.

19:36

This is an entirely mechanical device. There's no one speaking.

19:39

That's right.

19:42

Maddening.

19:42

You, like, really cannot overstate how mind blowing and revolutionary this was. At the time.

19:43

Sounds good to me now.

19:48

Yeah. So let me just play you one other bit of audio from this. In the course of the demo, he asks this woman who is playing the voter to play a song. And the one piece of context you need for this is the voter on its own. Sounds kind of depressed. You can hear it a little bit in that. It just seems sort of sad all the time.

19:50

Sad robot.

20:08

Yeah. So he asks, and you'll hear it's basically like, oh, you've been so depressed this whole time. Let's cheer up a little bit. Let's play something else.

20:09

Suppose you sing a song for us, will you?

20:16

Yes.

20:18

Well, how about Aulang Syne?

20:20

This is crazy because there's like a. There's a lever somewhere where they're controlling pitch, which is kind of like. It's like making the theremin speak or something. It's unbelievable.

20:44

The fact that it sounded like this ends up being kind of a feature, not a bug, for the rest of the life of the vocoder in a way that I think is really fun. But anyway, so he keeps building this thing out and largely doesn't figure out how to do the main thing he was trying to do, which is send voice over telegraph wires. But what he does figure out is at the beginning of World War II, the war is escalating and Winston Churchill and FDR are trying to communicate with each other across the Atlantic Ocean. And they have this sense they're using radio frequencies to talk to each other, and they have this sense that this is insecure. They're using like a scrambler technology from the 20s that worked technically, but they're both like, this probably isn't working. And in fact, they were right.

20:52

The Germans were listening.

21:34

The Germans were listening and scrambled decrypting everything. And they knew exactly what was going on. So the US government goes out looking for a secure voice technology. Basically, the idea was to create what they called secret telephony, which is just an awesome, awesome phrase. Secret telophony. Secret telephony is like the title of a book that should exist. But anyway, so they end up finding this group at Bell Labs working on this stuff. And at this point, Bell Labs, for a variety of reasons that are not necessary for this episode, is essentially like an arm of the US government. AT&T is a total monopoly. And it is like very in. In league with the US government in lots of ways. So, of course they go to Bell Labs, 1942, Bell gets this contract and they start building out this system called Sigsally. This Team ends up building this, like, astonishing amount of new technology. And p. Like you were talking about, they invent a huge amount of digital encoding and digital transmission and digital encryption. Like, there are so much early computer thinking.

21:35

Because once you figure. Once you figure that out, you can apply it to many things. Once you figure out that you can encode incoming signal, reduce the bands, and then reproduce it anywhere else after sending the signal, you can apply this to multiple things.

22:35

Yeah. So just. I don't want to dwell on this particular piece of it. I just want to explain one part of the technology that just made me laugh, and I want you guys to know, too. So the biggest challenge for this was figuring out not how to sort of send encrypted stuff through the air. They were able to. They knew how to do that, right? They can use radio transmissions to get across the ocean. The question is, how do we encrypt it? And the way to do that is you need encryption keys, right? You need a. You need a way to encrypt it on the sender's end and a way to decrypt it on the receiver's end. These two sides are across the ocean from one another, and we don't have computers. So what they do is, is all of the encryption keys were encoded onto vinyl records, and there were three copies made of every vinyl record. One was with the administration in the U.S. one was with Churchill's people. And then they would destroy the third one after they made the other two. So these. This thing gets delivered across the Ocean to do 12 minutes of encrypted conversation for each key, and then the thing gets destroyed. And they have these. These turntables on each side of the ocean and that are impeccably, perfectly synchronized in order to encrypt and decrypt as they're going so that these two people can have an intelligible back and forth conversation. Making all of this work requires, like, giant rooms full of equipment. It requires an entire group of military members to make this work. There's like, a bunch of enlisted people who just do this for a living. I mean, it's insane. And they had these things set up at these precisely scheduled intervals so that they could spin up all the machinery. It would work for eight hours at a time. And then they needed the other 16 hours of the day to maintain the system, to get it up and running for the next one. It was this impossibly complicated thing. I have a picture here of one of the rooms that they had, just to give you a sense of, like, the sheer scale of this. Just. Just to give you a sense, this is like early computer stuff where computers used to be the size of rooms and now they're the size of, you know, iPhones, watches.

22:52

A watch.

24:52

Yeah, no, they're the size of watches. But so this is what I mean. It was a vast amount of equipment, all so that these two leaders could talk to each other without anyone finding out.

24:53

What you're explaining is that the US military also invented turntableism and that the F in FDR stands for flash. Grandmaster Flash, Dr. Wow. And there are spinning records. The thing that upsets me the most about all of this is that. Do we have a recording of Churchill and FDR going through a vocoder? Does that not exist?

25:01

I was not able to find it, but there is. Is a lot of evidence that they could barely understand each other. The technology was not good. It like, barely. Barely worked, but it worked. And there's actually. There's a moment where the Germans discover this huge amount of traffic coming that they think is possibly important, you know, classified communications, but that they're never able to decrypt.

25:22

So the thing works because it's all vocoded.

25:49

Because it's all vocoded.

25:52

The big anecdote here and you know the title of Dave Tompkins book, How to Wreck a Nice beach, as you said, it didn't work and you could barely understand each other. That title means everything because they were trying to transmit the message how to recognize speech. And then it ended up on the other end as how to Wreck a Nice beach.

25:53

They were like, Normandy. Normandy's a beach. Yeah. We're going to wreck a really nice beach in Normandy. It's about to go down.

26:15

Yeah.

26:24

Maybe if this tech had been good, the war would have been really different. Yeah. That's a good summation of, like, there's words in there, but are they always the words that you think? Who's to say? And then the war ends, and this no longer is interesting.

26:24

Right.

26:38

So this whole huge project is spun up for basically two years. The war ends and everybody kind of loses interest. Other technology is starting to get better. They're working on more powerful telephony across borders and across the ocean. And so the. The vote coder starts to recede until our guy, Homer Dudley, our boy.

26:38

What's up, Homer?

26:59

What's up? Homer meets with this guy named Werner Meyer Eppler, which is an extremely scientist name. We just. We're just doing it here. He's a German scientist and he's a director of phonetics. And he is obsessed with synthesized speech as a thing. And he has worked on a bunch of ways, worked on a lot of ideas about how to create synthetic language of all kinds. And he immediately sees the potential for the vocoder in all kinds of different directions, including in music. And this is where I think our story really takes a right turn and sort of kicks off in a whole different direction. But before it takes over the music industry, let's take a break really fast and then we're going to play vocoder at each other for a while. I'm excited about it. We'll be right back.

27:00

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27:44

all right, we're back. So at this point in the vocoder story, it starts to become a music thing. And as I understand it, at the very beginning we were still in the era of like, synthesizers being rooms. The vocoder was a gigantic piece of technology. This stuff was not available to everyone, and yet people started to find it. Even in the, like the 50s and 60s, there seemed to be these sort of first stories of people poking around on the vocoder. Do you guys know sort of the early musical history? I actually had real trouble finding, like, who was the first person to really get their hands on a vocoder and do stuff with it. It just seems to have kind of percolated for a while.

30:17

I mean, I know, and I bet P can speak to it a ton. That early synthesizer history is just full of incredible tinkerers like P, who are just like, there are so many synthesizers that are not sort of in the pantheon of synthesizers. If you go and look through old vintage things that people were toiling with, really, once we enter the era certainly of the integrated circuit, things get a lot smaller. And it really has to do with the development of fundamental pieces of digital and analog technology. To be able to bring these things into the home or certainly into a studio.

30:56

Trying to go back and find the first person who actually used it is a bit tough because once you think you have somebody, then there's somebody else who resurfaces.

31:27

And it was all. It was just tinkerers all the way down.

31:36

We thought Peter franchise was the first. And then there's a guy in the 40s playing music, and then Pete Drake shows up. And then there's another guy using like, sort of like bagpipe looking mechanism who also plays something that looks like the talk box.

31:39

So I think the place in the history that is sort of noted as quite important is in the development of the Moog Modular system. So Moog, one of the most famous synthesizer companies. I am wearing their T shirt right now. The Moog Modular is that giant wall of synthesizers. Still pretty big, but it could fit in a room. So Bob Moog, one of his early collaborators, is, gosh, I guess, synthesist Wendy Carlos. They meet at AES the conference of Audio Engineer Society. And she has a lot of interest in synthesizers. He's building synthesizers. They start to collaborate. And one of the things that he builds for her is a vocoder. She is making one of the first home studios in Manhattan. She's recording her. She's beginning to record an experiment for what becomes this very famous album, Switched On Bach, where she plays the synthesizer through the world of Johann Sebastian Bach. Best selling classical album of all time, really.

31:51

Yeah.

32:49

Also the inspiration for Switched On Pop, my podcast. And one of the things that, in their collaboration that he makes for is this vocoder. And that vocoder ends up being performed in the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, a Huge Kubrick film, 1971. And she performs the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, fourth movement, the Ode to Joy, through the vocoder. And we hear the Ode to Joy, something one of the most famous pieces of all time, heard in an entirely new context in a dystopian sci fi.

32:49

Okay, I'm glad you brought this up because I also found that in the course of research as kind of the first. Like, if you were to pick a first sort of explosion moment for the vocoder in the music industry, the one that a lot of people now point back to as like, oh, that was the thing for me. It is Wendy Carlos and it is the Clockwork Orange. So let me just play it a very short clip from the Clockwork Orange bit. And I should say, if you're watching this or listening to this, for reasons I have come to understand about Wendy Carlos's people, there's a strong chance this audio will not work for you, but we're going to try it anyway. Here's just a little bit of. There's a choral arrangement in this Beethoven piece that she has a lot of fun with the vocoder. Just one. One tiny sliver of the thing. But it is like, that's Beethoven, dude. It's wild. But so, yeah, so this. This becomes the thing. And I think I found that in the course of research as kind of the first. Like, if you were to pick a first sort of explosion moment for the vocoder in the music industry, the one that a lot of people now point back to as like, oh, that was the thing for me. It is. It is Wendy Carlos and it is the Clockwork Orange. Can you just explain Charlie, who Wendy Carlos is just a little bit more. Because I do think she turns out to be a fascinating character through this and also like one of just the best people at the vocoder that we've ever had.

33:20

Well, she's one of the most important people in music history because of her early association with developing what ends up becoming the consumer synthesizer. Working alongside Bob Moog, she became famous for showing that the synthesizer is a legitimate instrument. There was a lot of anxiety about the synthesizer and its development. The French government tried to ban the synthesizer at one point for fear that it would replace working musicians. The synthesizer has some of the same fears that we have about robotics and the replacement of people. And so the synthesizer as it was first coming out, was not thought of as a beautiful instrument like the cello or the violin. And so she was able to show that it was expressive and was as beautiful as the same instruments that could perform Bach. She is important in the legacy of popular music as well because she's one of the first trans performers to come out. She does these huge soundtracks like Clockwork Orange. She had contributed to the Shining a bit.

34:51

She did a Tron soundtrack that people really love.

35:42

Exactly. So she did the first Tron soundtrack and she is a bit of a curmudgeon and also has decided to sort of exit society and pull all of her music from the world. And you can buy it directly from her website. That looks like it was made on geocities in 1993. I don't know if that is anachronistic around that.

35:44

The 90s geocities 1993 might be kind to what that website looks like.

35:58

And she's just wonderful. I absolutely, absolutely love her.

36:03

P and Dave, my question for you is kind of from here and as we go through the 70s, do you have a theory about what it is about this piece of technology at this time that really starts to take off?

36:06

I mean, from what you said, it's, it's because it's tied into the explosion of the synthesizer, Right. It feeds into the imaginary of robotics. Right. So I, I, I, I'm sure there's a through line where the narrative of synthesizer progress of the, of the advent and the progress of synthesizer technology and also the scientific, the science fiction imaginary through line cross and it's like, well, now we can make a robot voice. We have the technology for it. Let's use it in music. And it's interesting and it's, it's funny because at first it's like soundtracks or this sort of canonical interpretation. Let's redo Bach through this human voice. And perhaps after it becomes more autonomous and more sui generis, where you're just like, man, forget I can write my own song with This.

36:17

I think that the, the explosion of the technology, the explosion of synthesizer technology. There's something inherent about like new instruments to, to experiment with for musicians especially. That's like, you know, that's, that's very attractive. So naturally, as the technology becomes more available and accepted, somebody's gonna get on. You know, it's like when you first. They first discovered the distortion on the guitar, then all of a sudden everybody's using it. It changes the music.

37:14

But there's a link, I think, to pop culture, also post war pop culture. You know, in the Donald Fagan book at the beginning, when he talks about, you know, sort of growing up and listening to, being a fan of and, you know, Isaac Asimov and, and the imaginary that goes with robots and spaceships and aliens. Maybe like, okay, we have these tools and our imagination goes to robots. We can make this work together. I, I mean, this is a. This is. I just feel like there has to be a pop culture, collective consciousness, collective imagination thing that feeds into this as well.

37:48

Yeah, you're actually getting at a thing I've been wondering about through this whole process, which is. I think it's clear to me that the idea that you could play your own voice like an instrument is very powerful and that that just sort of breaks your brain in new ways as a musician. But what I've been trying to figure out is like, is the fact that it also sounds like a weird robot. Part of specifically what makes it compelling. Like, if the vocoder had just by accident sounded like something else, would it have been less exciting? Was there something about the robotness of it that was part of its appeal?

38:27

You have to have an imagination tied into a robot. When you say a robot, what was the signifier robot in people's minds at that time? Right. What was a robot?

38:58

I think a robot was, like I was saying earlier, something very simple that is endearing. Childlike.

39:09

I think. P's hitting something on the head. I think you're hitting the nail on the head because early on you guys said that the, the code, the voter sounded sad. Who sings say Goodbye?

39:17

Hiroshi Sato.

39:32

Okay, so that's probably one of the greatest vocal songs, right? That's a sad song. It's. It's got melancholy all over it. Our first song, the first Chromio song ever to be released ever under the name Chromio was a song called Mercury Tears. And it was also a melancholy song about a sad robot. And we use the VOC order for it specifically because I think you guys can probably express this better. Than me. I think there's an inherent sadness. Maybe it's the monotony.

39:33

It's a vulnerability. The. The absence of happy emotions because the tones are not there.

40:16

Right.

40:23

I think technically speaking, you're missing information. And the default thing when you don't have tones is sadness when you're monotone.

40:24

Right. Monotony. That's actually a great theory. I think where we're breaking new ground here is if we were to do a census of all vocode music with VOC order. VOC order. I think that the over. I think that the majority of it would have a sad. A sad affect or cold or cold. Craft work is cold.

40:33

If you think about Wendy Carlos, it's kind of cold. It's classical music. There's not much emotion. If you think about.

40:57

Which goes with Clockwork Orange. Yeah. These guys were completely devoid of empathy.

41:04

Yeah. If you talk about craftwork, it's completely cold.

41:09

Flat.

41:12

It's purposely, like, very flat. If you think about Laurie Anderson, sad. If you think about Hiroshi Sato. If you think about Herbie Hancock. I thought it was you. Sad.

41:13

P, you're sitting in front of a vocoder.

41:24

Can you.

41:26

Can you show us a little bit what this looks and feels like? Like when you say cold and sad, like, sound that out for us a little bit here.

41:27

If I say this in my real voice, I have emotion. I have. I can show you happiness. I can show you anything. But if I say this here, you can't hear any emotion unless I put some bitch down and some people. There's not much going on here in terms of emotion. You have a single note. The only thing you can do is change your pitch or make some chords, and then it becomes real sad.

41:35

Well, play happy chords. Go major. Do a 1, 4, 5. It is cold.

42:07

You're giving the. The mood with the chords. Right. Because if you're in music, you know that major chords are happy, minor chords are sad.

42:13

That's true. That's true.

42:22

If you're playing a single note and you're devoid of your vocal intonations, there's no more emotion. I can bring that back with chords. If I do this, and if I do this, I'm very sad. But if I go major, I'm very happy. Light switched on by.

42:23

You know. How funny. You know what's funny? I think it's. What's wild is the memory associations that we have with hearing something that P just played. So for me. Do the major chord again. For me, the major chord, I think. But that, to me, sounds like the planetarium. You know, a planetarium or something kind of science. Like a sort of optimistic science, you know, the discovery of space.

42:45

It's like the moment the sun comes out at the end of the. Yeah.

43:16

So like let's say let's. Let's like it.

43:19

And then Lori Anderson's oh, Superman is all like super sad in my. But she's only using chords. She's not doing top lines and stuff like Craft R or, you know, Herby Hancock. She's using chords and that's really just. Going on. Whereas if you have just a one unison kind of line, not chords, duh, you can only add some intonations with your pitch.

43:24

I think this is you guys best podcast.

43:56

This is great. Literally. What else. How did it take us this long to get to this? This is. This is great. So, P, you just mentioned two of the names I had written down that I wanted to ask you guys about, because I think the story from here is just sort of this like, Cambrian explosion of vocoder in music and new ideas about how to use. But I think two of the ones that came up for me over and over were Kraftwerk and Herbie Hancock. And P. I know Herbie Hancock had an album in particular that was really important for you, I think, because it literally had like a gear list of stuff that you ended up going and getting.

43:58

Sunlight. Yeah, gear list and pictures of the whole setup.

44:30

Incredible. Charlie, let's start with you and then Dave and P. I want to hear sort of your specific influences. But Charlie, when you think of like the biggest names in vocoder over the years, the ones who really either moved it forward or helped make it mainstream, or when you sort of close your eyes and hear a vocoder, what kinds of songs are we thinking about?

44:34

The answer for me is absolutely Daft Punk. I mean, they built their entire identity around being the robots. They slowly over across four albums, develop the voice of that robot, the heart and soul of that robot, and eventually give it sentience, and finally blow up the whole robots at the end. And so you see this development of these characters, but I didn't know for the longest time that they were manipulating their voices in lots of different ways. They used Talkbox, they used vocoder, they use Autotune. They use autotune. One of the first instances of Autotune was One More Time, but that song didn't come out until after shares Believe, which was sort of famous for.

44:54

That's the one.

45:31

Yeah, that's the big auto tune one.

45:31

Because Cher's Believe Everybody thought was a vocoder, but it was actually auto tune. And that blue people.

45:33

The producers lied because they didn't want to give away their secret. And so they said, oh, it's like a vocoding effect. It was also a new effect. But I always go to their final album, Random Access Memories because that's where they're really making an homage to the early 70s records they most loved. And use all of that equipment. So you can hear them using a proper sort of Moog style vocoder I guess on a track like Doing It Right or Lose Yourself to Dance. Those are the two big ones that stand out to me.

45:37

Oh come on, come on, come on.

46:06

That part exactly.

46:08

Lose Yourself to Dance.

46:09

For P and I. So obviously we're. We're, you know, gig enormous D. We're gigantomous death punk fans. But Random Access Memories is our least favorite album by then. But the. On your music, in your life, good life, back to music. That's when he really flexes on that one. Cuz that. That's a tough one to do. Cuz he's playing with.

46:16

He's playing with this thing.

46:45

The pitch, the pitch. It's a really good performance on that one. That's one of the technical ones that sort of. We couldn't. We couldn't do it. The doing it right. And also. Come on, come on.

46:48

Lose yourself to dance.

47:02

Yeah, yeah. Those are easier. Yeah, sure, those are easier. But that one,

47:03

I love the sad robots. Those are always the best. So like Game of Love within all of those.

47:09

Yeah. Game of Love is a sad robot. There's something really that ties into the imaginary. I'm not a huge sci Fi guy, But if the two most famous robots in pop culture were the two in Star wars were. What is it? R2D2 and C3PO.

47:15

C3PO.

47:39

But aren't they kind of like anti heroic? A little bit hapless, those two guys? I guess they're comic relief as well. But there's something a little bit tragic about them, right? Yeah.

47:40

Oh like R2D2 is kind of like a lost dog trying to find his owner. And like he's not voiced by a vocoder. Or rather he's voiced with an ARP 2600. Another synthesizer. But they do some voice transmission. I can't remember. Maybe he knows it better than I do. But there was a way that they were able to encode some sort of voice signal into it as well. And it sounds like he's talking. And that movie comes out in 1977 and Kraftwerks, the robots comes out in 1978. So I think in a lot of ways, I think Star wars is very much sort of setting in the popular imagination.

47:48

I think there's something also like the fear of technology and robots. And then all of a sudden you hear a soft, fragile voice on the song, and then you're like, oh, I'm not so scared after that.

48:17

That's such a great point. Also, we. We failed to mention. We forgot to mention one album that I think is really important in the VOC order canon, and it's Neil Young.

48:28

Oh, Trans.

48:38

Trans, yeah.

48:41

Neil Young. Not a name I would have thought of as vocoder.

48:42

Great artwork. Probably one of the best. Neil Young, best album artworks ever.

48:45

The song Transformer Man. Transformer Man.

48:49

All right, let's play it for a song.

48:52

Transformer.

48:54

It is so sad. That's really great. We. I could listen. I have to. Yeah, that's a really good one.

49:01

I think we should do a companion playlist. Charlie, I think you should list to this episode and have everything that we've mentioned, like the Lori Anderson stuff, the Clockwork Orange stuff, Daft Punk, the Chromeo. We should have a nice. Like a Chromio. Our first Mercury Tears. And we also.

49:09

We're.

49:28

We. We like different kinds of VOC orders. So we. This is the. The role. The. This is our sort of most retro sounding one. But we love VOC order plugins. We love other synths that have VOC order.

49:29

Yeah, I remember the. The lie. The big lie when Cher came out.

49:43

Oh, yeah.

49:46

Was that. It was a Digitech talker.

49:47

Oh, yeah. You told me this. Of course. Yeah, of course.

49:49

And that's what they told the people, and that threw us into a loophole.

49:52

Oh, yeah. We wasted one year.

49:55

Yeah, we.

49:56

We wasted a whole year trying.

49:57

I was like, I'm. I don't. I know that's not it. Like, somebody's lying. I bought one and I. I tried it and I'm like, I know how to use this. This is not it. And. And they kept lying about it for this, this whole time. And then I was in there, like, trying to chop vocals up and be. Maybe they're only inserting that part where it's vocated, you know?

49:59

Point is, there's many different vocal ders. Many different ways to achieve robotic speech.

50:17

Yeah.

50:26

Can you guys actually school us briefly on, like, technically what that looks like? It's definitely true that there's. There's tons of them out there now. I went looking to see if there's One sort of like the vocoder. And as far as I can tell, there just isn't. And there ever really has been that this. This isn't also different.

50:26

The VC10 is, I think, what they used on Intergalactic.

50:40

Okay.

50:43

Or it sounds like a VC10. It's super low fire. There's like one band and. And then you can go super detailed with plugins. And even this is. This one's pretty detailed.

50:44

So this is. Can we tell this is a Roland VP330.

50:53

Yeah.

50:57

Why this one? Why is this one special?

50:58

Because that's the one that Herbie Hancock used on. Thought it was you.

51:00

I'm looking up now. It was only made from 1979 to 1980, which I think speaks to sort of the niche quality of the vocoder is that, like there's the P's out there in the world. Like there are people who just so badly want this instrument, but there is not. You know, you probably can't sustain a business off of being the vocoder business.

51:04

David, you were asking about the mechanics of it. So this one doesn't come with its own mic. You have to bring. You have to byom, which is that thing. No. And then you have to plug in the mic and so piece speaking. Right. So what's cool about our setup now is that the other mic is kind of picking up on his. Because you. You really have to speak and play at the same time.

51:20

Yeah. Well, this mic speaking. My real voice. And this one is just a vocal. So voice. My voice is being coded into this. And all you're hearing is the. Out of the synthesizer.

51:40

But you're speaking contrary to the talk box, where you're just enunciating.

51:54

Yeah, I'm speaking. Yeah.

51:57

And actually, if, as we're talking about emotional charge, I would argue that the talk box is much happier.

51:58

Interesting.

52:06

I can't. There's. It's much happier. And because you.

52:07

You're able with a talk box to add more inflections, more. More humanity.

52:11

Yep.

52:17

Okay.

52:17

More pitch bends. More. Right.

52:18

Because it's not electronic at all. The talk box is very human. It's very analog.

52:19

Can you draw a line from one to the other? Like the way you just described it make them sound like sort of fundamentally different things, but sort of pointed in the same direction.

52:25

They're mechanically different. Mechanically opposite.

52:34

But that sort of. I would think. And again, I was learning this about auto tune too. If you can sort of think of the vocoder as one of the beginnings of a lot of things that Then splinter off in a lot of different directions. But this idea of I can manipulate my voice in these ways and I have this kind of control. Can you categorize these things near each other, do you think? Even if they're not the same thing, which, again, we all know that they're not.

52:37

I mean, technically speaking, no.

52:59

In terms of the end result, yes.

53:03

The end result, yes. Because at the end of the day, you're manipulating something that's on the pitch. So what Auto Tune does, it's your actual voice that's being corrected with a pitch corrector. And when you push the pitch corrector to react in zero delay time, it'll make the step effect that you hear that will sound like a talk box. When you purposely add a note before the note you're playing to hear a step and to help you in pronunciation.

53:04

If I can explain the, the Auto Tune thing more in layperson's terms, basically, it's. So it's correcting your pitch, right. But if you exaggerate the pitch correction,

53:33

the reaction time, right, it's going to

53:44

get rid of the slide in your voice. So instead of making you do. It'll just go, go. And that's why you get those little. Because it's not gliding anymore once you, Once you exaggerate the. The.

53:47

The whole thing with Auto Tune is that they make pitch correction sound natural because they wait a little bit of time before they correct your wrong note.

54:07

And. But if you make them not wait.

54:17

If you make them not wait, it'll correct it right away and it'll sound like.

54:19

Yeah. Instead of sounding, instead of doing. Yeah.

54:26

Either granular, micro, microscopic level.

54:32

So that's Auto Tune. Talk Box, correct me if I'm wrong.

54:35

Talk Box. You add this. You add these notes to help your intelligibility, your pronunciation.

54:38

The genesis of the Talk Box. Peter Frampton made it popular on the guitar.

54:45

And then we can say who made it popular. Stevie made it, made it popular on the synth. On the synth. And Peter Frampton on the guitar. And then.

54:49

And then on the guitar. There's a long, rich history of. Of Talk Box on the guitar. What's his name? From the Eagles. Joe Walsh. Is that his name? From the. From the Eagles. He's a big Talk Box guy. He's got one of his biggest songs of Talk Box Guy. Talk Box guitar. I'm sorry. And then Bon Jovi, of course.

54:56

Because you can use it as just an effect.

55:15

Yeah. Make your guitar.

55:18

It's like a filter.

55:19

Yeah, it's a filter. And then on the Keyboards. You feeding a synth through the talk box? It starts with Stevie and then Roger Troutman really made it huge. And then. And then Daft Punk used it as well.

55:20

You have a talk box in the room. You need to get us the talk box. We need to show how this works. I think we're gonna take a break. We're gonna finish this and then we're gonna do the version history questions. We'll be right back.

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57:11

All right, we're back. Pete, can you just describe for the listeners this thing that you just put in front of yourself?

57:14

So this is a talk box, as opposed to the vocoder. It's an analog instrument. So it takes. Physically the sound of the synthesizer goes into this pedal, which is an amplifier. Which is an amplifier, but mostly it's a speaker. So it's literally pushing sound. It's a crude, A crude instrument. You just pushing sound out of. Out of a speaker that you then send into your mouth through this giant.

57:21

Is it, is it cruel that my immediate thought Was that. It kind of looks like a CPAP machine, but yeah. And then it goes through this giant tube that goes in the side of your mouth. Oh, yeah.

57:52

I'm sitting here with David and Charlie and what. So this is really physically sending the sound of the synthesizer through the tube.

58:07

And then Pete takes the tube in his mouth, and all you're doing is enunciating.

58:18

You're shaping this with your mouth.

58:23

Oh, wow.

58:29

You're removing your vocal cord function and the. And the ability to push any sound out, and this becomes your vocal cord. So all you have to do is use your mouth. Oh, yeah. All I'm doing is shaping the sound with my mouth.

58:29

Yeah, baby.

58:47

Babel.

58:50

Yeah.

58:54

Let's say stuff.

58:56

See how much more.

58:57

Say that. Say what you're about to say. But with the talk box, you see

58:58

how much more expressive I can be. I can say stuff and sound really expressive.

59:01

So this gives you. I mean, there's, like, all kinds of stuff you can do here that you just couldn't do on the vocoder that you were playing. Right. And my question for you is going to be like, how do you describe sort of musically, what's. What this feels like to you, as opposed to using a vocoder? But I feel like I can hear the difference.

59:10

Yeah. It's more like timberly. Like, what does it do, you know?

59:25

Oh, I see. I would say again, in layperson's terms, because I'm a lot, like, less technical than P in our.

59:29

You guys tell me on the outside.

59:35

Well, I think so. The VOC order doesn't sound great with single notes.

59:36

Yep.

59:41

Right. It sounds better with chords. Talk box on a single note sounds good because the. The. It's piercing through. Right. Play. Play a single note and you. It's very clear.

59:41

Right?

59:53

You can make it very clear. Obviously, you have to be. Be really good and used to all this, like, input of sound.

59:53

The learning curve for the talk box is immense.

59:59

But then. But then.

1:00:01

Because if you don't. If you don't pronounce correctly, you're just gonna sound like.

1:00:02

And then do the same thing pronounced.

1:00:08

Well, you have to learn how to speak.

1:00:10

Oh, wow.

1:00:12

It's another way of speaking.

1:00:12

But then when you do chords on the talk box, it sounds a little bit like a vocal cord.

1:00:15

Yeah. You can do this too. If you add some notes and polyphony, it sounds pretty good, in my opinion.

1:00:19

Yeah. So Pete, when we play live, P plays this. But like we said on the albums, we used a whole range.

1:00:32

There's so much like Physicality to both of these things that you've done. Right. Like, it's. It's not nothing to me that you didn't show up with a laptop and play a bunch of stuff off of your computer. Does it feel different? I mean, obviously the Talkbox requires a giant CPAP tube, but is it. Does it. Does it feel different doing this stuff with this kind of dedicated hardware as opposed to just, like, playing it in software now? So much music is just software now.

1:00:38

Yeah, it's much better.

1:01:03

It's like if you're playing a live

1:01:05

guitar or a plugin versus a plugin versus a plugin. I prefer playing this.

1:01:06

And you can express a lot of emotion because think about Roger. I want to be your man. Like, he's really able to. We should put that on the playlist, by the way. I want to be your man by Roger is like a romantic, flirtatious ballad where he's, you know, he's sort of professing his love, and he's able to do it with the talk box. And it's quite convincing.

1:01:12

It's all about. Like I said earlier, like, you add the humanity back with the talk box. So it's all about the player. It's not about the notes you're using or even the technology.

1:01:41

Because with the Talkbox, there's. You modulate. You're in more control.

1:01:52

Yeah. You have way more control of the parameters. You know, like the way you open your mouth or you decide to stay close them so you can. You can convey more emotions with it.

1:01:55

They should have used this in the military. You can really be like, guys, we're in trouble. Or, you know, armistice coming soon. It's going to be okay. Yeah.

1:02:09

There's a lot more emotion on the radio waves. So all of our problems are solved. Where was this? So you guys were talking before, earlier, when we were at break, about how you think about the. The interplay of all this stuff in your music. Right. And I think this is. This is where we are now. Right? Is. Auto tune is everywhere.

1:02:16

Everywhere.

1:02:32

Talkbox is not everywhere, but still around. You guys brought it back. I'm giving you guys full credit. Congratulations. You did it. Vocoder still around, still doing stuff. And. And you guys, even in your music, you. You use all of these things.

1:02:33

Yes.

1:02:45

Not interchangeably, but, like, deliberately. How do you think about that mix at this point?

1:02:45

Music production is a bunch of choices all the time. Songwriting choices and sonic choices. And depending on the song that we're working on, we decide together which kind of vocal processing or Vocal effect, we're going to use what's going to fit the best on the song. To use songs that everybody knows. The vocal effect that you put on your voc on your. On the song really can have a massive, massive end result. Can change the end result. So I guess we're talking about death.

1:02:50

Yeah. Even if you can't tell the difference for the layman who. What's. If it's auto tune, a vocoder or a talk box. Even if you can't tell the difference, you will feel it. And that's our job to make you

1:03:21

feel a certain feeling.

1:03:34

Depending on what we're using.

1:03:35

Yeah.

1:03:37

If we're. If we want to do something where we can. We need to get a bit more emotion out of the vocal robot. Out of the robot effect, we'll use a talk box. If we want something that's purposely cold, we're going to go for the vocal.

1:03:37

If we want something that's a little more modern and that also kind of references other music that people are familiar with, whether it's T, Pain, Cher, whatever, then we'll do auto tune. But I was just going to say it really changes the emotional charge of the end result because, you know, because Charlie's such a Daft Punk fan. If you try to imagine one more time without the autotune, it would be a. It would be almost sound like gospel, you know, like especially the part where he goes, you don't stop. It'd be a little too emotional and it'd be a little cheesy, I think. And the autotune brings it into this modern.

1:03:51

Yeah. If you. Simple things. Like in that song, when he goes. Yeah. You know, how many times have we heard.

1:04:29

Yeah.

1:04:35

On songs. But how many times have you heard. Yeah.

1:04:36

It just sounds cooler.

1:04:40

Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:42

Less cliche. So. So, yeah. So everyone just uses different. It's like, you know, different guitar pedals or different guitar sounds or just different instruments based on the song's needs and what you want to convey.

1:04:44

One of my favorite things to do is watch Chromeo recreate their songs on a short form video, long form video, wherever. And you get to see master painters at work where most of us aren't. Our ears are amazing. We are so tuned to hear timbre and texture and subtlety. But to know how to deconstruct it and recreate it for people, it's such a gift. They are master painters of sound. And when they're in their studio, you guys have dozens and dozens of keyboards. And each one provides subtly different textures that you layer to create unique emotions. And I think that similarly, these various vocal technologies that change how you feel, they're going to create a subtly different feeling of whatever core emotion you're trying to get in the song. Go back very briefly to film. In film, nobody wants to make the sound of a Cylon robot from Battlestar Galactica that used a vocoder. Whenever you make a robot, the sound effects team work really hard on finding a new way to create a roboticized voice. So every single tool that we use is gonna create a fundamentally different emotion or relationship to that song.

1:04:57

It's really interesting and it actually leads me to. So Dave and Pete, we have to let you guys go here. Cause you have other important things to do. But I do wanna know, just before we let you guys go, how you think about the vocoder in particular at this moment in the music industry. Have we reached the point where it is kind of so everywhere that we don't even think about it in the same terms that we used to? Where it was novel and new and interesting and exciting. It's just another tool in the tool belt? Or does it occupy a different space

1:06:08

musically right now in electronic music? It's alive and well in sort of the most virtuosic producers of electronic music. When I say virtuosic, I mean people who are, who are very advanced technically. I mean, you know, to me the, the goat of that stuff would be Skrillex. He uses some plug in variation of VOC orders on a lot of his music. And it, and it's, it always has like a really radical effect, really expressive effect. But I think to, to come back to the original impressions that, that that P was using to describe it, there's a naivete, there's a purity, there's. There's sometimes a melancholy vulnerability, a vulnerability inherent. Human emotions that are, that are. That emanate from that style of vocal processing.

1:06:37

Totally. All right, well, Dave and Pete, we have to let you guys go, but thank you so much for doing this. This, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.

1:07:27

Thanks guys.

1:07:34

Thank you.

1:07:35

Will you, will you play yourself out?

1:07:36

Thank you guys for having us.

1:07:37

We will see you soon.

1:07:40

Yes.

1:07:42

All right, Charlie, you're still here. We have the eight version history questions where we try to put every product we talk about into its correct context. And the first question is the version history time matrix. And the time matrix is a concept that many have argued doesn't make any sense, but I don't care, and we do it anyway. And the Idea is essentially we map idea and time. So is it the right idea at the right time? Was it the right idea at the wrong time? Wrong idea, wrong idea?

1:07:44

Well, it depends where we begin. I think it's the right idea at the wrong time to begin with, which is that it doesn't have a purpose. Like the voter was ridiculous. And yet it was really just ahead of its time because it was foundational in developing the capacity for wartime coordination in the Great War or in World War II, rather. I think it also, as Dave was telling us, it is the initial compression algorithm. And so much thinking was happening from a lot of smart people to make this stuff happen. So much of contemporary music is based off of technologies that were built for military use, whether that's compression, encoding, even recording to tape, originally used by the military. Germans figured that out first.

1:08:12

I didn't know that.

1:09:01

Oh, yeah, Great story in David Byrne's book about that. So originally wrong technology, way ahead of its time, but found a lot of compelling use. And now I think, as we saw from Dave and P, it's like all these different various vocal processing technologies. They timberly. Maybe sound similar. Ish. They have really different technologies underlying them. Something as crude as the talk box or as complex as the vocoder. We don't need these tools anymore. Now we just get to use them for expression.

1:09:02

Yeah.

1:09:32

So they've outlived themselves as well.

1:09:33

That's a good way of looking at it. I think. Right idea, wrong time is the right way of thinking about it. And to me, it's very telling that this was kind of just a thing a guy was doing in a research lab that he was just sort of on a lark about maybe I can solve this problem. And wound up solving a completely radically different problem.

1:09:34

This is why we have research for things that seem like they have no purpose, because, wow, the great things that we discover.

1:09:51

Totally right idea, wrong time. I agree. Question number two. Was this peak anything?

1:09:57

Was it peak?

1:10:02

Was the vocoder peak anything? And I think for this one, I want to go to peak vocoder, which is probably like 70s and 80s music.

1:10:02

Oh, okay. Well, I was gonna say it was peak. Planning war via the voice of Daft Punk.

1:10:11

Sure, yeah.

1:10:15

Peak.

1:10:17

Winston Churchill sounding like a robot. For sure.

1:10:17

Yeah. I feel like the 1970s was a moment where everyone felt like they had to try this thing out. It ended up, I think, in some ways, being a bit of a fad or a fad that everyone had to try, and then they sort of dispersed into the larger world of Music. So was it peak anything? Yeah, it was peak 1970s. Let me try to talk like a robot.

1:10:20

I do. Yeah, I think there's a real chance it was peak robot voice. The vocoder is definitely peak robot voice.

1:10:37

Because when you say talk like a robot, you're like, I am a robot. I don't have any emotion in my voice because I'm not changing the pitch. Yeah.

1:10:43

Okay, one more. Is it peak cool looking music gadget? I was struck looking at all of these pictures by like, every one of these is just like, what if a piano had a million wires coming off of it and just looked like steampunk? Awesome. Like, is there a cooler looking music gadget than a vocoder?

1:10:51

One of the longest running synthesizers that's still being manufactured is the microkorg. The microkorg is the sound of so much 2000s synth sounds.

1:11:08

It wasn't.

1:11:20

It was the synthesizer that you didn't have to learn how to play.

1:11:21

It's.

1:11:23

It's sort of toy sized. It has a bunch of presets.

1:11:24

I've seen a lot of, like, indie pop bands pull this out for a song and put it on a table.

1:11:27

It's the guitar player who doesn't play keyboards has one of these and it's on a table. And coming off of it is a little gooseneck microphone. And I think that gooseneck microphone is doing a lot for the microkorg. We have one in front of us as well. This is the Arturia Mini Freak. And I think that it's like, what is that thing doing? Are you a air traffic controller? Why do you have a gooseneck microphone? So I think visually, it's giving a lot.

1:11:32

Yeah, I tend to agree. All right, question number three. If you could travel back in time, knowing everything we know now and develop this thing yourself, could you make it more successful? And my real question here is if you could go back to our man, Homer Dudley and say, hey, bud, you've got this all wrong. This is for music. Like, what are you doing, bud? Don't worry about the telephones. They'll figure themselves out. You've made an instrument. Do you think you could meaningfully change the direction of this thing in an even better way? I'm not sure that you could.

1:12:00

Well, no, the thing that makes this work musically is that it makes us sound less human.

1:12:32

Yes.

1:12:37

And so to prove it, all you do is get closer to reality.

1:12:38

Right.

1:12:42

I mean, if you had gone to Homer Dudley and be like, there's an algorithm you could develop that will become autotune on Cher's Believe. Maybe he could get some great credits on a song.

1:12:43

Sure, yeah.

1:12:52

But I don't think we could have improved this technology. In fact, I kind of worry if we had gone back and be like, so all of your life's work is going to turn into a bunch of.

1:12:52

A bunch of German DJs. Yeah.

1:13:04

Maybe the war would not have been won, because he would. Well, this is useless. So let's not. Don't go back in history. Like, Butterfly Effect is real. Don't talk to Homer. Just let him make this thing.

1:13:06

I do like the theory that maybe if we go back and tell Homer what's going on, instead of inventing the vocoder, he invents autotune and we just skip this entirely and we lose this whole interesting era of sounding like robots. Because he didn't want to sound like robots. Just the only thing he knew how to do.

1:13:17

Yeah.

1:13:30

Question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? And I actually think this is a fun question for you. As a student of music history. We are in a moment of deep retro nostalgia for a very particular time in culture. In so many ways. Yes, deeply and obviously the vocoder is not gone. All of its sort of legacy ideas are not gone. But I do think the, like, front and center, like, vocoder based music is not quite as present as it once was. Could it come back? Are we getting robot songs again? Whoa.

1:13:30

You know, what's hitting me now is that there has been. I think we're kind of past this. There's been a real big 1970s nostalgia in art, design music. If you look at the COVID of Taylor Swift's Midnights, for example, the album that came out a few years ago, it looks like a Scene from a 1970s Architectural Digest tour. Just the wood paneling and the dark green and this kind of thing. This moment of 70s nostalgia has lacked a. Let's listen to a bunch of vocoder. We've left things out. This is what happens with nostalgia. It's always a false memory of a thing that we never probably experienced as we, like, we think we did, and we left the vocoder out. So I think it's probably going to miss that little nostalgia cycle. Is it going to be cool again? I hope that people make it cool again by finding new ways of saying something with it, rather than just trying to do what great people like Herbie or Stevie does in the 1970s.

1:14:01

Yeah. All right, question number five. What feature of this should every current version have? This is a slightly Tricky one, because vocoders still exist, but in the sort of sweep of time with vocoders, is there anything you feel like we've lost or left behind that maybe it's time to pull back out of the past?

1:14:56

I don't know. I think they've gotten better. They're smaller. I mean, they come with their own mic now. Bring your own mic is a terrible strategy.

1:15:12

More wires. My only note, I'm saying, I'm telling you, man, all the ones from the 70s and 80s, they just have a million. They look like a. Like a bomb from a comedy movie where they have to snip all the wires. Unbelievable.

1:15:19

Yeah.

1:15:29

I would never in a million years know how to play one. And I want one just to have.

1:15:30

Right. I don't think there's much that I'm gonna change. Synthesizers have gotten smaller and cheaper. I'm pretty happy about that.

1:15:34

That's fair. Do you have a favorite synthesizer?

1:15:41

Oh, no. That's like picking my favorite child.

1:15:43

So you have one, but you can't tell me which one it is?

1:15:46

I do have a synthesizer that I play the most, but. Yeah. No, I mean, they're all. There's a reason why so many studios, when you go to them, you just see walls of synthesizers or walls of guitars, is they each create a different kind of texture for a different style of music in the right place and the right time. So no favorite synthesizer. Though I will say that a lot of the early ones got it right. Like the first poly synth, the Prophet, the first consumer monosynth, the Moog Model D. I would love to own two of those collectively. They cost like $10,000. And they have really nice looking wood paneling.

1:15:50

That's that. Bring that up.

1:16:23

More wood paneling.

1:16:25

On technology.

1:16:26

More wood paneling.

1:16:26

We're in. We found it. All right, three more questions. These are the version History hall of Fame questions. The product has to pass all three of these tests.

1:16:28

Okay.

1:16:35

And then I get a veto if I want to. But we'll see where we land. Question number one is, did this product do something truly new?

1:16:35

Yeah, absolutely. Again, this question would be so easy to prove in the positive if only we had the recordings of FDR and Churchill talking to each other.

1:16:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For that thing alone, I think the answer's probably yes. No. Question hall of Fame question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? I think this one's tricky, actually.

1:16:53

Well, I think it was remarkably bad as a technology for encoding voices, for military coordination, given the book how to Recognize Speech for Music incredibly good. It's such a power, be sure.

1:17:04

But I want to divorce good and influential.

1:17:19

Right?

1:17:23

Like, it's. There are lots of things that aren't any good.

1:17:23

I think of things that are good in music as things that have strong character. So oftentimes, like, in addition to liking electronic dance music, I also love bluegrass. And a lot of bluegrass guitar players will try to seek out these, like, rarefied, incredibly expensive old acoustic guitars that oftentimes don't necessarily even play that well. But they were built in a way, and they've aged in a way, and they used wood that no longer exists today that just resonates in this way, gorgeous sort of way. Finding an instrument that has great character, that can speak that own instrument's voice. That is what great musical instruments are. There's a lot of digital synthesizers that make perfect sounds that don't sound good because they lack character. Our voice has character. Every voice has, like, rasp grain, something that is imperfect about it. That is why I actually think the vocoder is a great instrument because of all of its idiosyncrasies and the way that it doesn't capture things accurately.

1:17:26

Yeah, it's a good argument, and it is something that came up over and over in research is people love this thing because it's weird and it is unpredictable, and it is bad when you don't want it to be, but it's also bad when you want it to be.

1:18:22

It's got patch cables.

1:18:33

Come on. All right, we'll give it that. It is actually both remarkably good and remarkably bad. So it passes that one with flying colors. Question number three. And actually, this one, I think, is trickier than I thought at the beginning of this episode. Did it have a lasting impact? Does the vocoder, like, capital M, matter? I think in the we're going to throw out the we won World War II bit of it all, because we can't give that to the vocoder.

1:18:34

Can we not?

1:19:00

That's for another day.

1:19:03

Okay.

1:19:04

But in this case, I think, you know, you've talked about the real sort of moment that it had. It's still a tool that people use. But you convinced me a long time ago that there is very much a world before auto Tuner, a world after Autotune. Autotune, I think, unquestionably passes this test.

1:19:04

Oh, absolutely.

1:19:19

Does the vocoder pass the same way?

1:19:20

I was just hosting the product lead of Antares Autotune in some of my courses yesterday, and I heard from them that they think about what they make with this huge reverence and responsibility because it touches every modern recording. And if it's not in perfect working condition, the music industry stops totally. Whether that's for the autotune effect or for just gentle tuning, even live performance, its lasting impact is not that it is still being used today widely, but rather that it changed how we can think about how the voice can be used. And so all of these other technologies span from the vocoder. I was talking to Antares Autotune yesterday. They were showing me they have their own other technologies that are like vocoder like technologies to help you manipulate the voice and, say, speak new kinds of emotion into music. And so I think that it gave us a new imagination about how we can sound, what we can do with our voice. That is the lasting impact. The actual box itself, I mean, yeah, it belongs on a shelf. It doesn't need to be out on stage anymore.

1:19:22

Sure. So that's interesting. So it had a sort of huge philosophical impact. So that's three for three. You think it belongs in the hall of Fame?

1:20:31

Hell, yeah. I would like you to buy some of these old folkloaders. You want to get one of those on reverb.com, they're like $10,000. I can hold onto it for you if you'd like.

1:20:40

If we put it in the hall of fame, I think by rule, we then get to expense buying one.

1:20:49

Perfect.

1:20:53

Just for the photos. Yeah, that feels right.

1:20:54

Yeah.

1:20:56

All right. We're putting it in the version history hall of Fame. You've convinced me. I came in thinking that the lasting impact was debatable, but I think the bigger picture of, like, if you think about auto tune and you think about the Talkbox and you think about the way we play our voice and understand that that's an undeniably huge cultural shift.

1:20:56

Hall of Fame.

1:21:18

All right. Let's go, Vogue Hoder. Welcome to the hall of Fame. All right, Charlie, thank you so much for doing this. This has been a true delight. This is the least I've ever known about a Version history episode, and I have had an absolute blast getting to do this with you and the Chromeo guys.

1:21:18

Thank you.

1:21:31

All right, thank you, as always, for watching and listening the best way you can support everything that we're doing. Listen to Switched On Pop, listen to Chromeo, and subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com Subscribe. It's the thing that lets us do all of this. Thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you next time. Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kieffer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino and Alex Parkin. Our Editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffern and Joe Nebras. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. You can follow the dedicated Version History Podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrive and you can watch full episodes on our new YouTube channel version history Podcast and to support everything we do and get access to this and all of our other podcasts ad free because become a paid subscriber to the Verge. Thanks

1:21:31

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