How did this robot sound come to fruition?
It works by breaking the voice into very narrow frequency bands, tracking the envelopes of those bands, transposing them based on a frequency set by a modulator, and recreating the envelopes in these newly transposed envelopes.The vocoder was developed by Bell Labs as an audio compression technique to save bandwidth when transmitting human conversations long distances.Let’s dive into the vocoder, how it works, what it does, and how it’s been used in pop and electro music today. Words by Sam McNiece A history of the vocoder, showing its influence and popular vocoder plugins.įrom their humble beginnings as a way of condensing the human voice for transmission through cables underseas, the vocoder has had a long and storied history which included use in World War Two as a form of cryptography before it made Kraftwerk and Bambaataa sound like futuristic robots and spur on the creativity of millions.
