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Robot Music: A Brief History
"The Vocoder is a speech analyzer and synthesizer, originally developed as a speech coder for telecommunications applications in the 1930s. The Vocoder can be used to encrypt secure radio communications, transforming the voice into incomprehensible digital information, which can be decoded on the other end of a low-bandwidth radio transmission. The Vocoder has also been used extensively as an electronic instrument.
In 1970, electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog developed one of the first truly musical Vocoders. A 10-band device inspired by the Vocoder designs of Homer Dudley, it was originally called a spectrum encoder-decoder, and later referred to simply as a Vocoder. The carries signal came from a Moog modular synthesizer, and the modular from a microphone input. The output of the 10-band Vocoder was fairly intellgible, but relied on especially articulated speech.
Most people recognize Vocoder-augmented speech as shorthand for Robot communication. In fact, the Vocoder has been widely used for Robot speech in films and television since the 1950s...The device was relegated to novelty status in music for many decades, but reached an expressive apex through Germany's Kraftwerk. Songs like "Trans Europe Express," "The Robots," and "Numbers" came at a time when disco was ostensibly dead and the new hope for the genre lay in European acts who had transformed New Wave from radio-friendly pop to synth-driven dace music. "Numbers" dominated the dance floor in post-STAR WARS America with abstract automaton fantasies and a counting-as-a-second-language hook. Vocoder voice was a common feature in Kraftwerk's futuristic aesthetic, creating a bizarre sound that was both technology-obsessed and retro, both campy and sincere.
European dance records like Kraftwerk's were also becoming huge street hits for the burgeoning hip-hop community in New York City boroughs, Afrika Bambaataa was listening to these records as the phenomenon of breakdancing was developing on the streets of Queens and The Bronx, and he set out to make a record specifically geared for this high-energy dancing style. Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" borrows heavily from previous club hits, bit is widely recognized as the record that claimed techno-pop for the streets. The rootic style of the music quickly influenced the breakdancing world, transforming the ephemeral sound of the Vocoder into a bodily representation of robotic motion. After the immense success of "Planet Rock" and the proliferation of B-Boy culture into the bedrooms of America, technology-conscious American dance music grew exponentially." - Gabriel Fowler
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