Robotic voice effects

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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.

Vocoder

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

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

Though the vocoder 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 invented by Gilbert Wright in 1939. It worked by placing two loudspeakers over the larynx and as the speakers transmitted sounds up the throat, the performer would silently articulate words which would in turn make the sounds seem to "speak." It was used to create the voice of the piano in the Sparky's Magic Piano series from 1947, many musical instruments in Rusty in Orchestraville, and as the voice of Casey the Train in the films Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon^{[citation needed]}. Radio jingle companies PAMS and JAM Creative Productions used the sonovox in many of the station IDs they produced.

Talk box

The

2Pac and Roger Troutman is a more recent recording featuring a talk box fed with a synthesizer instead of guitar. Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips used the talk box on parts of the group's eleventh album, At War with the Mystics, to imitate some of Wayne Coyne

's repeated lyrics in the "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song".

Pitch correction

The vocoder should also not be confused with the Antares

Big Bang

.

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 Daleks

in Dr Who.

Speech synthesis

Robotic voices in music may also be produced by speech synthesis. 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 U96. A more tongue-in-cheek musical use of speech synthesis is MC Hawking. Most notably, Kraftwerk, 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".

Comb filter

A comb filter 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 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.

References