If you've listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you've probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research ...

Stop Smiling Books/ Melville House; 335 pp. The room contains two turntables and a microphone. Hulking consoles line the walls, covered in dials and gauges and blinking lights, like the bridge of ...

A scientific tool for those lacking a voice, a means of encrypting voices during World War II, and a way to drop the funk, the vocoder has had many exhale its praises, from General Dwight D.

The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine. sort of alienated from your body. It ...

The vocoder—code name Special Customer, the Green Hornet, Project X-61753, X-Ray, and SIGSALY—started distorting human speech in earnest during World War II, in response to the excellence of German ...

Originally developed for telecommunications and military applications in the 1930s, the vocoder, a portmanteau of voice encoder, as a musical tool has become indelibly associated with artists such as ...

On his 1982 album Trans, Young used the vocoder to empathize with his son's struggles with communication, a result of his cerebral palsy. Neil Young was then sued by Geffen for not sounding like Neil ...

It is hard to remember that scant decades ago, electronic magazines — the pre-Internet equivalent of blogs — featured lots of audio circuits based on analog processing. Music synthesizers were popular ...

Sometimes a melody just captures your ear in a way that renders you powerless to resist. I've written before about "For You," the R&B-ish ballad recorded by both Stefon Harris and Robert Glasper last ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Softube has introduced Vocoder, a new plugin that delivers exactly what its name implies.

French electronics company Arturia, which is mostly known for its electronic music equipment, has announced that its MicroFreak has been updated with a vocoder function and a new white makeover. A ...

When Arturia announced the MicroFreak in January of 2019 I said “there's nothing stopping Arturia from adding more oscillators down the road through firmware updates.” And the company has not ...