 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2008) |
Robotic voice effects became a recurring element in popular music starting in the second half of the twentieth century. Several methods of producing variations on this effect have arisen.
The vocoder was originally designed to aid in the transmission of voices over telephony systems. In musical applications the original sounds, either from vocals or from other sources such as instruments, are used and fed into a system of filters and noise generators. The input is fed through band-pass filters to separate the tonal characteristics which then trigger noise generators. The sounds generated are mixed back with some of the original sound and this gives the effect.
Vocoders have been used in an analog form from as early as 1959 at Siemens Studio for Electronic Music [1] [2] but were made more famous after Robert Moog developed one of the first solid-state musical vocoders. [3]
In 1970 Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog built another musical vocoder, a 10-band device inspired by the vocoder designs of Homer Dudley which was later referred to simply as a vocoder.
Carlos and Moog's vocoder was featured in several recordings, including the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for the vocal part of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" and a piece called "Timesteps". [4] In 1974 Isao Tomita used a Moog vocoder on a classical music album, Snowflakes are Dancing , which became a worldwide success. [5] Since then they have been widely used by artists such as: Kraftwerk's album Autobahn (1974); The Alan Parsons Project's track "The Raven" ( Tales of Mystery and Imagination album 1976); Electric Light Orchestra on "Mr. Blue Sky" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman" ( Out of the Blue album 1977) using EMS Vocoder 2000's.
Other examples include Pink Floyd's album Animals , where the band put the sound of a barking dog through the device, and the Styx song "Mr. Roboto". Vocoders have appeared on pop recordings from time to time ever since, most often simply as a special effect rather than a featured aspect of the work. Many experimental electronic artists of the new-age music genre often utilize the vocoder in a more comprehensive manner in specific works, such as Jean Michel Jarre on Zoolook (1984), Mike Oldfield on QE2 (1980) and Five Miles Out (1982). There are also some artists who have made vocoders an essential part of their music, overall or during an extended phase, such as the German synthpop group Kraftwerk, or the jazz-infused metal band Cynic.
Though the vocoder is by far the best-known, the following other pieces of music technology are often confused with it:
An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
Kraftwerk is a German band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Widely considered innovators and pioneers of electronic music, Kraftwerk were among the first successful acts to popularize the genre. The group began as part of West Germany's experimental krautrock scene in the early 1970s before fully embracing electronic instrumentation, including synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders. Wolfgang Flür joined the band in 1974 and Karl Bartos in 1975, expanding the band to a quartet.
A vocoder is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation.
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.
A sound effect is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. Traditionally, in the twentieth century, they were created with foley. In motion picture and television production, a sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or creative point without the use of dialogue or music. The term often refers to a process applied to a recording, without necessarily referring to the recording itself. In professional motion picture and television production, dialogue, music, and sound effects recordings are treated as separate elements. Dialogue and music recordings are never referred to as sound effects, even though the processes applied to such as reverberation or flanging effects, often are called "sound effects".
Time stretching is the process of changing the speed or duration of an audio signal without affecting its pitch. Pitch scaling is the opposite: the process of changing the pitch without affecting the speed. Pitch shift is pitch scaling implemented in an effects unit and intended for live performance. Pitch control is a simpler process which affects pitch and speed simultaneously by slowing down or speeding up a recording.
Digital music technology encompasses digital instruments, computers, electronic effects units, software, or digital audio equipment by a performer, composer, sound engineer, DJ, or record producer to produce, perform or record music. The term refers to electronic devices, instruments, computer hardware, and software used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis, and editing of music.
An analogsynthesizer is a synthesizer that uses analog circuits and analog signals to generate sound electronically.
Computer World is the eighth studio album by German electronic band Kraftwerk, released on 10 May 1981.
The Mix is the tenth studio album by the German electronic music band Kraftwerk. It was released on 11 June 1991 by Kling Klang and EMI in Europe and by Elektra Records in North America. It has entirely re-arranged and re-recorded versions of a selection of songs which had originally appeared on Kraftwerk's albums Autobahn (1974) to Electric Café (1986). Some of the songs, such as "The Robots" and "Radioactivity", have new additional melodies and/or lyrics.
Electronic Music Studios (EMS) is a synthesizer company formed in Putney, London in 1969 by Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell. It is now based in Ladock, Cornwall.
A talk box is an effects unit that allows musicians to modify the sound of a musical instrument by shaping the frequency content of the sound and to apply speech sounds onto the sounds of the instrument. Typically, a talk box directs sound from the instrument into the musician's mouth by means of a plastic tube adjacent to a vocal microphone. The musician controls the modification of the instrument's sound by changing the shape of the mouth, "vocalizing" the instrument's output into a microphone.
Auto-Tune is an audio processor introduced in 1996 by the American company Antares Audio Technologies. It uses a proprietary device to measure and alter pitch in vocal and instrumental music recording and performances.
Pitch correction is an electronic effects unit or audio software that changes the intonation of an audio signal so that all pitches will be notes from the equally tempered system. Pitch correction devices do this without affecting other aspects of its sound. Pitch correction first detects the pitch of an audio signal, then calculates the desired change and modifies the audio signal accordingly. The widest use of pitch corrector devices is in Western popular music on vocal lines.
A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and frequency modulation synthesis. These sounds may be altered by components such as filters, which cut or boost frequencies; envelopes, which control articulation, or how notes begin and end; and low-frequency oscillators, which modulate parameters such as pitch, volume, or filter characteristics affecting timbre. Synthesizers are typically played with keyboards or controlled by sequencers, software or other instruments, and may be synchronized to other equipment via MIDI.
Homer W. Dudley was a pioneering electronic and acoustic engineer who created the first electronic voice synthesizer for Bell Labs in the 1930s and led the development of a method of sending secure voice transmissions during World War Two. His awards include the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal (1965).
The Korg VC-10 is an analogue vocoder which Korg launched in 1978. Vocoding refers to voice encoding of speech and singing with musical synthesis. It gained popularity in the 1970s following utilisation by bands such as Kraftwerk and Electric Light Orchestra. The VC-10 allows basic functionality in operation and modulation of signal carriers. It has two microphone input options.
The Bell Telephone Laboratory's Voder was the first attempt to electronically synthesize human speech by breaking it down into its acoustic components. It was invented by Homer Dudley in 1937–1938 and developed on his earlier work on the vocoder. The quality of the speech was limited; however, it demonstrated the synthesis of the human voice, which became one component of the vocoder used in voice communications for security and to save bandwidth.
WaveNet is a deep neural network for generating raw audio. It was created by researchers at London-based AI firm DeepMind. The technique, outlined in a paper in September 2016, is able to generate relatively realistic-sounding human-like voices by directly modelling waveforms using a neural network method trained with recordings of real speech. Tests with US English and Mandarin reportedly showed that the system outperforms Google's best existing text-to-speech (TTS) systems, although as of 2016 its text-to-speech synthesis still was less convincing than actual human speech. WaveNet's ability to generate raw waveforms means that it can model any kind of audio, including music.