The Vocoder
Released on 08/19/2014
(upbeat electronic music)
[Voiceover] The voice was robotic,
and so there was hesitancy
and sort of a mistrust
in hearing a voice that's not your own,
sort of alienated from your body.
It was just all the better for music.
(heavy electronic music)
Probably the first time I heard of a vocoder
was, I don't know, '77 maybe?
Something like that.
And probably in a keyboard store.
I didn't hear it on a record.
I just was always poking around in music stores
and it was appealing to me as a way
to process the voice
which does sound a little bit authoritarian,
robotic, you know, kind of corporate institutional,
very good for sort of slogans,
and I used to do this song where there were a lot of things
like the US Postal System slogan.
♫ And the voice said,
♫ Neither snow nor rain
♫ Nor gloom of night
♫ Shall stay these couriers
♫ From the swift completion
♫ Of their appointed rounds
I only found out after I'd used it for awhile
what the military history was of the instrument
and it's origin in code is something
that I love about it
and it is able then to tweak language,
corporate language in ways that make you,
that can be a little bit chilling.
[Robotic Voice] It's time we have the vocoder set
so that the speech is entirely remade
out of this type of energy.
Sister Suzie sells seashells
down by the seashore.
Sister Suzie sells seashells
down by the seashore.
[Voiceover] A vocoder is basically a device
that takes in human speech and it actually disassembles
the speech signal and turns it into a series
of digital signals.
(heavy electronic music)
The point of the vocoder
is that it can create fewer bits
in the signal.
It's a slower speed signal that you can then
transmit better over long distances.
[Voiceover] Homer Dudley was a physicist
who worked at Bell Labs
and is credited as the inventor
of the vocoder.
He wanted to transmit human speech
under water through the transatlantic cable.
You could basically save bandwidth
and save copper costs
by compressing phone conversations
and the vocoder could break the voice down
and transmit only the necessary intelligence
of human speech,
the necessary frequencies.
The transatlantic cable idea was not successful
because it was still expensive to develop
these models of vocoders at that time.
But also the quality of speech was garbled.
(forlorn garbled ballad music)
Bell Labs did a cover version of an old Irish folk song
called Love's Old Sweet Song,
just a song at twilight,
and it's this forlorn ballad
with a vocoder.
This was not a pop hit,
I don't think it was ever released,
but they realized the music potential.
The vocoder really took ahold of the late 1970's
and in particular with the DJ's like Afrika Bambaataa
and Jazzy J,
and Bambaataa was definitely a vocoder ambassador.
(heavy electronic music)
And he had kids in an apocalyptic landscape
looking towards the future,
playing these parties in the Bronx
and playing Kraftwerk records.
(robotic electronic music)
[Voiceover] Now, for Kraftwerk,
now I know I was well aware of the vocoder
before they came along.
My name is Ben Cenac, professionally known
as Cosmo D from the group Newcleus
and from the DJ crew Jam-On Productions.
(electronic bass music)
(laughter)
♫ Yeah
♫ Jam on it
♫ Yeah, yeah, we know, we know
♫ Jam on it
I got into futuristic stuff in the 70's,
I was always a sci-fi nut ya know,
Star Trek, comic books, and all of that.
And I got into synthesized music
more as a necessity because it was what I could afford.
So I used to do parties, we'd call it Cosmo D
with his beat box, bass box, voice box, and space box.
(laughter)
You know, try to show that up.
♫ Let's go to work
♫ Got what'll make your body jerk
♫ We can throw your hands up in the air
♫ Shake your booty and scream Oh yeah
The computer age is about us giving power
and turning things over to the computers,
losing our humanity to computers
and something that's happening right now.
But you know, that's why I made sure
with the vocoder, so you don't know
whether it's the human asking the question
or the computer asking the question,
but the question is are we under their control
or are they under our control or what.
(heavy electronic music)
The music, everything feels like a dream,
but the science that brought it there.
It would be nice if we could get more technology created
out of things inspired by, for peaceful reasons
and positive reasons
but some of the dopest shit we have
came out of military technology.
[Voiceover] In all the history of war,
never has signal communications
or the Signal Corps played as vital a part
as it does today in every part of the world.
[Dave voiceover] Yes, military, the Signal Corps
we're looking for secure voices
in a way to discourage eavesdroppers
because Churchill and FDR's conversations
were basically being compromised.
Instead of looking for some device
or some sort of technology that could create
indestructible speech impregnable to code breakers
and the lab called it Project X.
The US Signal Corps referred to it as SIGSALY.
There were 12 terminals strategically developed
throughout the course of the Second World War
and created this massive phone scrambling system.
At the NSA museum in Fort Mead, there is a SIGSALY replica
that gives you an idea of the size.
Like one vocoder terminal was roughly
2500 square feet and it was the heart
of the SIGSALY system.
It would sample these signals and then
it would be transmitted over radio telephone
and then the vocoder's synthesizer dimension,
the synthesizer component would take this information
and reconstruct it into human speech.
But that wasn't enough, to just have vocoder
to break the voice down.
They needed a randomized code key to lock in the code
and they used turntables.
So these records would play thermal noise
and that noise would be subtracted
at the receiving end.
And leaving you with a metallic accent.
[Voiceover] This is the KO-6.
This signal is closed to SIGSALY in performance.
(garbled robot speech)
[Dave voiceover] As the war progressed,
it was used in the invasion of Germany,
firebombing Tokyo, and the planning
of the bombing of Hiroshima.
The vocoder has witnessed some of the most important
and some of the most tragic moments in history,
particularly with the Second World War.
[Frank] I graduated from college in 1965
and I got to work on secure voice
and we were developing a secure voice system
for the Navy and in the end you could be
out in the Gulf of Tonkin on a ship
and they could eventually relay that back
to the Pentagon and they could talk to each other.
The vocoder was a key element
because that's what digitized the voice
to then go in and get encrypted
so that it was secure and they went
into a development of a system called
the Linear Predictive Coder.
It worked on a mathematical algorithm
and it would essentially predict
what the speech wave form was going to do next.
And the cell phone you have
probably has a Linear Predictive Coder system in it.
You hold it in your hand here,
you go that whole thing now put
into a simple handheld device.
(electronic music)
[Dave voiceover] Homer Dudley's original vision
of compression is a part of our daily lives.
We speak in these, through cell phone technology
as these imperfect replicas of ourselves
and that brings the past right into the future.
Here you had a device that was invented
to improve telecommunications universally
and then it's repurposed only
to be used by restricted, very restricted few,
like generals and heads of state and the military.
And then repurposed again by musicians,
Latino, African American kids in the Bronx
and in New York who were relating to it
in a totally different way.
Because it's kind of an outsider thing
in a lot of ways.
These weirdos drawn to the idea
of inhabiting a different character,
a different voice.
And the vocoder is often referred to
as post-human, but I mean,
what's more human than wanting to be something else?
And the vocoder was that something else.
♫ Good work, jam on
♫ Another world is safe for freedom, justice
♫ And the galactic funk.
♫ Time to ride off into the universe partners.
Starring: Laurie Anderson, Cozmo D, Dave Tompkins
The long, circular history of loops
Puffed: The Magic of Cereal
The Phone That Could Not Be Killed
Cheese Powder: A Brief History
Aereo’s Tiny Antennas
The Vocoder
The Really Big One: Earthquake Preparedness in The Pacific Northwest
Malcolm Gladwell Discusses School Shootings
How CRISPR Can Help Fight Cancer
Atul Gawande: Was Your Operation Necessary?