Transcript

(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.