Robotic voice effects
Encyclopedia
"Robot voices" 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.
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 filter
s 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 but were made more famous after Robert Moog
developed one of the first solid-state
musical vocoders.
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". In 1974 Isao Tomita
used a Moog vocoder on a classical music
album, Snowflakes are Dancing
, which became a worldwide success. 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
.
is by far the best-known, the following other pieces of music technology are often confused with it:
Sonovox
Talk box
Pitch correction
Linear prediction coding
Ring modulator
Speech synthesis
Comb filter
Vocoder
The vocoder was originally designed to aid in the transmission of voices over telephonyTelephony
In telecommunications, telephony encompasses the general use of equipment to provide communication over distances, specifically by connecting telephones to each other....
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 filter
Band-pass filter
A band-pass filter is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects frequencies outside that range.Optical band-pass filters are of common usage....
s 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
Analog signal
An analog or analogue signal is any continuous signal for which the time varying feature of the signal is a representation of some other time varying quantity, i.e., analogous to another time varying signal. It differs from a digital signal in terms of small fluctuations in the signal which are...
form from as early as 1959 at Siemens Studio for Electronic Music but were made more famous after Robert Moog
Robert Moog
Robert Arthur Moog , commonly called Bob Moog was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.-Life:...
developed one of the first solid-state
Solid state (electronics)
Solid-state electronics are those circuits or devices built entirely from solid materials and in which the electrons, or other charge carriers, are confined entirely within the solid material...
musical vocoders.
In 1970 Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A...
and Robert Moog
Robert Moog
Robert Arthur Moog , commonly called Bob Moog was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.-Life:...
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
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
to Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange (film)
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
for the vocal part of Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
's "Ninth Symphony" and a piece called "Timesteps". In 1974 Isao Tomita
Isao Tomita
, often known simply as Tomita, is a Japanese music composer, regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music and space music, and as one of the most famous producers of analog synthesizer arrangements...
used a Moog vocoder on a classical music
Classical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...
album, Snowflakes are Dancing
Snowflakes are Dancing
Snowflakes Are Dancing is an electronic music album by Isao Tomita, recorded in 1974 and first released as a Quadradisc in April. The album consists entirely of Tomita's arrangements of Claude Debussy's "tone paintings", performed by Tomita on a Moog synthesizer...
, which became a worldwide success. Since then they have been widely used by artists such as: Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk is an influential electronic music band from Düsseldorf, Germany. The group was formed by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider in 1970, and was fronted by them until Schneider's departure in 2008...
's album Autobahn (1974); The Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project was a British progressive rock band, active between 1975 and 1990, consisting of singer Eric Woolfson and keyboardist Alan Parsons surrounded by a varying number of session musicians....
's track "The Raven
The Raven (song)
"The Raven" is a 1976 song by the Alan Parsons Project from their album Tales of Mystery and Imagination. The song is based on the Edgar Allan Poe poem of the same name. It is well-known as being one of the first rock songs to use a vocoder, developed by EMI, to distort vocals. It is also one of...
" (Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the debut album by the progressive rock group The Alan Parsons Project, released in 1976. The album's avant-garde soundscapes kept it from being a blockbuster, but the interesting lyrical and musical themes — retellings of horror stories and poetry by...
album 1976); Electric Light Orchestra
Electric Light Orchestra
Electric Light Orchestra were a British rock group from Birmingham who released eleven studio albums between 1971 and 1986 and another album in 2001. ELO were formed to accommodate Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne's desire to create modern rock and pop songs with classical overtones...
on "Mr. Blue Sky
Mr. Blue Sky
"Mr. Blue Sky" is a song by English rock group Electric Light Orchestra, featured on the band's seventh studio album Out of the Blue . Written and produced by frontman Jeff Lynne, the song forms the fourth and final track of the "Concerto for a Rainy Day" suite, on side three of the original double...
" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman
Sweet Talkin' Woman
"Sweet Talkin' Woman" is a 1978 single by The Electric Light Orchestra from the LP Out of the Blue. Its original title was "Dead End Street", but it was changed during recording, perhaps to avoid confusion with a 1966 hit of the same title by the Kinks...
" (Out of the Blue
Out of the Blue (Electric Light Orchestra album)
The 30th Anniversary Edition was released on February, 20th 2007 with three bonus tracks.-Personnel:ELO*Jeff Lynne – lead vocals, backing vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion*Bev Bevan – drums, percussion, backing vocals, fire extinguisher on "Mr...
album 1977) using EMS Vocoder 2000's.
Other examples include Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
's album Animals, where the band put the sound of a barking dog through the device, and the Styx
Styx (band)
Styx is an American rock band that became famous for its albums from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Chicago band is known for melding the style of prog-rock with the power of hard rock guitar, strong ballads, and elements of American musical theater....
song "Mr. Roboto
Mr. Roboto
"Mr. Roboto" is a song written by Dennis DeYoung and performed by the band Styx on their 1983 concept album Kilroy Was Here. In Canada, where they were always more popular than in their native U.S., it went to #1 on the RPM national singles chart, becoming their third single to top the charts in...
". Vocoders have appeared on pop recordings from time to time ever since, most often simply as a special effect
Special effect
The illusions used in the film, television, theatre, or entertainment industries to simulate the imagined events in a story are traditionally called special effects ....
rather than a featured aspect of the work. Many experimental electronic artists of the New Age music
New Age music
New Age music is music of various styles intended to create artistic inspiration, relaxation, and optimism. It is used by listeners for yoga, massage, meditation, and reading as a method of stress management or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments, and is often...
genre often utilize the vocoder in a more comprehensive manner in specific works, such as Jean Michel Jarre
Jean Michel Jarre
Jean Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer and music producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and New Age genres, and known as an organiser of outdoor spectacles of his music featuring lights, laser displays, and fireworks.Jarre was raised in Lyon by his mother and...
on Zoolook
Zoolook
Zoolook is the fourth overall mainstream studio album by Jean Michel Jarre, and released on Disques Dreyfus in 1984. It makes extensive use of digital recording techniques and sampling. It is considered by many fans as one of Jarre's most experimental albums to date...
(1984), Mike Oldfield
Mike Oldfield
Michael Gordon Oldfield is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age, and more recently, dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature...
on QE2
QE2 (album)
QE2 is the sixth record album by Mike Oldfield, released in 1980 on Virgin Records.The album contained both original Oldfield compositions as well as two cover version of pieces recorded by other bands .- Album analysis :The longest tracks on the album are "Taurus I" and the title track, "QE2",...
(1980) and Five Miles Out
Five Miles Out
Five Miles Out is the seventh record album by Mike Oldfield, released in 1982, at a time when his music was moving away from large-scale symphonic pieces towards a more accessible pop style. It is one of the very few albums on which Oldfield sings lead vocals, as he is noted for not having any...
(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
Synthpop
Synthpop is a genre of popular music that first became prominent in the 1980s, in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic art rock, disco and particularly the "Kraut rock" of...
group Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk is an influential electronic music band from Düsseldorf, Germany. The group was formed by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider in 1970, and was fronted by them until Schneider's departure in 2008...
.
Other examples
Though the vocoderVocoder
A vocoder is an analysis/synthesis system, mostly used for speech. In the encoder, the input is passed through a multiband filter, each band is passed through an envelope follower, and the control signals from the envelope followers are communicated to the decoder...
is by far the best-known, the following other pieces of music technology are often confused with it:
Sonovox
- This was an early version of the talk box used to create the voice of the piano in the Sparky's Magic PianoSparky's Magic PianoSparky's Magic Piano is the second in a series of children’s audio stories featuring Sparky, an original character created for Capitol Records in 1947. Sparky is a little boy with an overactive imagination...
series from 1947. It was used as the voice of many musical instruments in Rusty in Orchestraville. It was used as the voice of Casey the Train in Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon. Radio jingle companies PAMSPAMSPAMS , based in Dallas, Texas, was the most famous jingle production company in American broadcasting. It produced identification packages for radio stations around the world, as well as some commercial music.-History:The company was founded by William B. Meeks, Jr. PAMS (an acronym for Production,...
and JAM Creative ProductionsJAM Creative ProductionsJAM Creative Productions, Inc., is an American company that produces radio jingles, promo music for television, and commercial jingles for advertisers. It has made more radio jingles than any other jingle company and has become part of American pop culture....
also used the sonovox in many stations ID's they produced.
Talk box
- The talk boxTalk boxA talk box is an effects unit that allows a musician to modify the sound of a musical instrument. The musician controls the modification by lip syncing, or by changing the shape of the mouth...
guitar effect was invented by Doug Forbes and popularized by Peter FramptonPeter FramptonPeter Kenneth Frampton is an English musician, singer, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. He was previously associated with the bands Humble Pie and The Herd. Frampton's international breakthrough album was his live release, Frampton Comes Alive!. The album sold over 6 million copies...
. In the talk box effect, amplified sound is actually fed via a tube into the performer's mouth and is then shaped by the performer's lip, tongue, and mouth movements before being picked up by a microphone. In contrast, the vocoder effect is produced entirely electronically. The background riff from "Sensual Seduction" by Snoop DoggSnoop DoggCalvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. , better known by his stage name Snoop Dogg, is an American rapper, record producer, and actor. Snoop is best known as a rapper in the West Coast hip hop scene, and for being one of Dr. Dre's most notable protégés. Snoop Dogg was a Crip gang member while in high school...
is a well-known example. "California LoveCalifornia Love"California Love" is a hip hop song by 2Pac featuring Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman. The song was released as 2Pac's comeback single upon his release from prison in 1995. A popular remix version of the song appeared on his 1996 double album All Eyez on Me...
" by 2Pac and Roger TroutmanRoger TroutmanRoger Troutman was the lead singer of the band Zapp who helped spearhead the Funk movement and heavily influenced West Coast hip hop due to the scene's heavy sampling of his music over the years...
is a more recent recording featuring a talk box fed with a synthesizer instead of guitar. Steven Drozd of the The Flaming LipsThe Flaming LipsThe Flaming Lips are an American alternative rock band, formed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1983.Melodically, their sound contains lush, multi-layered, psychedelic rock arrangements, but lyrically their compositions show elements of space rock, including unusual song and album titles—such as "What...
used the talk box on parts of the groups eleventh album, At War with the MysticsAt War with the Mystics-At War with the Mystics 5.1:Like The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, At War with the Mystics was released as a special edition 5.1 CD+DVD-Audio mix on October 24, 2006...
, to imitate some of Wayne CoyneWayne CoyneWayne Michael Coyne is the lead singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter for the band The Flaming Lips.-Early life:...
's repeated lyrics in the "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song".
Pitch correction
Pitch correction
Pitch correction is the process of correcting the intonation of an audio signal 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 vocoder should also not be confused with the Antares Auto-TuneAuto-TuneAuto-Tune is a proprietary audio processor created by Antares Audio Technologies. Auto-Tune uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise off-key inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed singers to perform apparently perfectly tuned vocal...
Pitch Correcting Plug-In, which can be used to achieve a robotic-sounding vocal effect by quantizingQuantization (signal processing)Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping a large set of input values to a smaller set – such as rounding values to some unit of precision. A device or algorithmic function that performs quantization is called a quantizer. The error introduced by...
(removing smooth changes in) voice pitch or by adding pitch changes. The first such use in a commercial song was in 1998 on BelieveBelieve (Cher song)"Believe" is a song by American recording artist Cher. It was released on November 24, 1998 as the lead single from her twenty-third studio album of the same name. It was written by Brian Higgins, Stuart McLennen, Paul Barry, Steven Torch, Matthew Gray, and Timothy Powell and produced by Mark...
, a song by CherCherCher is an American recording artist, television personality, actress, director, record producer and philanthropist. Referred to as the Goddess of Pop, she has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globes and a Cannes Film Festival Award among others for her work in...
, and the radical pitch changes became known as the 'Cher effect'. This has been employed in recent years by artists such as Daft PunkDaft PunkDaft Punk are an electronic music duo consisting of French musicians Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter . Daft Punk reached significant popularity in the late 1990s house movement in France and met with continued success in the years following, combining elements of house with synthpop...
(who also use vocoders and talk boxes), T-PainT-PainFaheem Rasheed Najm , better known by his stage name T-Pain, is an American singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer, and actor, currently signed to Young Money Entertainment. His debut album, Rappa Ternt Sanga, was released in 2005. In 2007, T-Pain released his second studio album Epiphany,...
, Kanye WestKanye WestKanye Omari West is an American rapper, singer, and record producer. West first rose to fame as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records, where he eventually achieved recognition for his work on Jay-Z's album The Blueprint, as well as hit singles for musical artists including Alicia Keys, Ludacris, and...
, the Italian dance/pop group Eiffel 65Eiffel 65Eiffel 65 is an Italian three-piece group formed in the late 1990s and best known for pioneering in pitch-correction and autotune, and for their international hit "Blue ". Their other hit singles include "Move Your Body" and "Too Much of Heaven", all of which appeared on their album Europop,...
, Japanese electropop acts Aira MitsukiAira Mitsukiis a Japanese electronica artist, produced by Terukado Ōnishi. She debuted in August 2007 with "Colorful Tokyo Sounds No. 9" and released her debut album, Copy on September 3, 2008.- Musical background and releases :...
, Saori@destinySaori at DestinySaori at Destiny is a Japanese electronica artist, produced by Terukado Ōnishi, who also produces Aira Mitsuki. She made her independent debut on December 5, 2007 with the single "My Boy" and has released two studio albums and one mini-album to date, named Japanese Chaos, Wow War Techno and World...
, Capsule, MegMeg (singer)Meg born on October 3, 1980 in Hiroshima, Japan, is a Japanese singer-songwriter, composer, and fashion designer.-History:Meg made her singing debut in July 2002 with the song "Scanty Blues", produced by Yasuyuki Okamura....
and PerfumePerfume (group)Perfume is a Japanese all-girl trio from Hiroshima, Japan, consisting of Ayano Ōmoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki. They debuted locally in 2001 and made their transition to a major label in 2005, focusing more on electropop...
, and some KoreanSouth KoreaThe Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
groups, most specifically 2NE12NE1Both the song and the group became popular online: Fire topped Mnet's online chart and 2NE1 became a popular search term. The group was awarded three Cyworld Digital Music Awards; "Lollipop" and "Fire" both won "Song of the Month" and the group won "Rookie of the Month" for May 2009...
.
Linear prediction coding
- Linear prediction coding is also used as a musical effect (generally for cross-synthesis of musical timbres), but is not as popular as bandpass filter bank vocoders, and the musical use of the word vocoder refers exclusively to the latter type of device.
Ring modulator
- Although ring modulation usually does not work well with melodic sounds, it can be used to make speech sound robotic. As an example, it has been used to robotify the voices of the DalekDalekThe Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Within the series, Daleks are cyborgs from the planet Skaro, created by the scientist Davros during the final years of a thousand-year war against the Thals...
s in Dr Who.
Speech synthesis
- Robotic voices in music may also be produced by speech synthesisSpeech synthesisSpeech 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...
. This does not usually create a "singing" effect (although it can). Speech synthesis means that, unlike in vocoding, no human speech is employed as basis. One example of such use is the song Das Boot by U96U96U96 is a dance music project formed by the German DJ and producer Alex Christensen and a team of producers called Matiz , known for a number of 1990s Eurodance hits.-Biography:...
. A more tongue-in-cheek musical use of speech synthesis is MC HawkingMC HawkingKen Lawrence is a nerdcore hip hop artist who purports to be theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking rapping under the name MC Hawking.MC Hawking gained some popularity on the Internet in the early 2000s...
. Most notably, KraftwerkKraftwerkKraftwerk is an influential electronic music band from Düsseldorf, Germany. The group was formed by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider in 1970, and was fronted by them until Schneider's departure in 2008...
, who had previously used the vocoder extensively in their 1970s recordings, began opting for speech synthesis software in place of vocoders starting with 1981's Computer World album; on newer recordings and in the reworked versions of older songs that appear on The Mix and the band's current live show, the previously vocoder-processed vocals have been almost completely replaced by software-synthesized "singing". VocaloidVocaloidis a singing synthesizer application, with its signal processing part developed through a joint research project between the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and Japan's Yamaha Corporation, who backed the development financially—and later developed the software into the commercial product...
is a singing synthesizer application software developed by the Yamaha Corporation that is designed to synthesize singing by entering lyrics and melody.
Comb filter
- A comb filterComb filterIn signal processing, a comb filter adds a delayed version of a signal to itself, causing constructive and destructive interference. The frequency response of a comb filter consists of a series of regularly spaced spikes, giving the appearance of a comb....
can be used to single out a few frequencies in the audio signal producing a sharp, resonating transformation of the voice. Comb filtering can be performed with a delayDelay (audio effect)Delay is an audio effect which records an input signal to an audio storage medium, and then plays it back after a period of time. The delayed signal may either be played back multiple times, or played back into the recording again, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo.-Early delay...
unit set to a high feedback level and delay time of less than a tenth of a second. Of the robot voice effects listed here, this one requires the least resources, since delay units are a staple of recording studios and sound editing software. As the effect deprives a voice of much of its musical qualities (and has few options for sound customization), the robotic delay is mostly used in TV/movie applications.