Coded Voices and Boxes That Talk

Dunlop Heil Talkbox HT1

Popular music has long boasted a fascinating arsenal of tools for the purposes of enhancement and experimentation in the recording of vocals and instruments. Two of the most groundbreaking and recognizable of these innovations were the talk box and the vocoder, both of which you’ve undoubtedly heard in countless songs, even if their names ring few bells.

Contrary to popular beliefs, the talk box doesn’t enable one to talk through a guitar or amplifier. It merely allows a guitarist to create musical sounds while playing and moving their mouth as notes are sounded. A plastic tube connected to an effects box receives amplified vibrations in the same manner as the singer’s own vocal chords. As the player sounds notes, the open end of the tube within their mouth enables the guitar’s pitch to mimic the mouthed sounds.

An iconic trend of rock in the 1970s made famous by Peter Frampton, it actually dated back to the late 1930s when jazz guitarist Alvino Rey recorded “St. Louis Blues” on his “talking” steel guitar, ‘Stringy.’

Peter Frampton in concert

Another steel guitarist, Pete Drake, an accomplished Nashville session player, used the invention to popular effect on his hit, “Forever.” It was actually Drake who introduced the talk box to Frampton although other guitar heroes like Jeff Beck and Joe Walsh employed it before him. It can also be heard on Rufus’s hit, “Tell Me Something Good”, Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” and Pink Floyd’s “Pigs(Three Different Ones).” The talk box’s later appearances included hits by Kix, Bon Jovi snd Alice In Chains.

Often conflated with the talk box is the vocoder, a voice synthesizer used abundantly in popular music throughout the Seventies and early 1980s.

Developed in 1928 as an experimental means of carrying voice communication across long distances by reducing its bandwidth, it was actually employed for coded communication purposes during World War ll.

A vocoder essentially divides the voice into separate bands of frequency which are then sent through their own filters. The resulting sound occurs when each filter is adjusted to the frequency of the voice’s signal.

Korg synthesizer and vocoder

Usually adopting a cold and impersonal ‘robot-like’ sound, the vocoder became a common feature of popular music in rock’s ‘post-punk’ years where ‘new wave’ and electronic artists like Kraftwerk from West Germany experimented with it as a supplement to synthesizers and an alternative to singing. It can be heard in various degrees of usage in the music of many artists including Blue Öyster Cult, Alan Parsons Project, Alice Cooper, the Cars, Ozzy Osbourne, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson and Neil Young.

Though the vocoder has inevitably dated somewhat since its heyday, its style and artistic influence are evident in the subsequent popularity of technologies like Auto-Tune, itself a processor whose initial purpose was to fine-tune singers’ voices in studio settings.

Do you feel like you hear music in ways that it sounds as opposed to the ways it is sung or played? Does some music sound more to you like ‘signals’ that are ‘filtered’ rather than actual voices and instrumentation?

“Just let the music speak for itself.” -Santana

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Christopher Robinson

Televisionaries

Within a relatively recent historical period, modern society has achieved the luxury and benefits of viewing the world through the scope of a variety of media outlets including print, radio and social media. All of these technologies can connect us promptly yet vicariously to the stories and events we otherwise couldn’t share or experience.

Front & center:
Arthur Godfrey

Undeniably, among the most revolutionary of these mediums was that of television.

A technological marvel that was developed by a succession of brilliant inventors throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, TV’s aim was essentially to transmit images and sounds from a source to a receiver. Traditionally sent by radio waves(broadcasted), today it can also be received through cable, satellite and internet technologies.

The Cisco Kid starring Duncan Renaldo
was the first TV
program filmed in color.

In short, the electronic television contained a cathode ray tube where electrons were beamed into an empty “vacuum” of the tube. The negatively charged electrons would then find their way to positively charged anodes on the screen. “Steering coils” would magnetically move the beam in various directions. Phosphorus dust on the inside of the screen would then emit light as the beams scanned across the screen in rows, forming the transmitted image.

Imogene Coca & Sid Caesar
in Your Show of Shows

In the Twenties and Thirties, the first television stations in America were built with the first TV sets commercially available in 1938. The first TV program believed to have been broadcast was The Queen’s Messenger, ten years earlier.

None of these breakthroughs occurred overnight and television’s subsequent advancements, color and increased sound and image resolution have continued in a similarly unmitigated manner.

<< This RCA Victor / radio / phonograph combination console was a wedding present to my parents from my uncle. As a toddler, my brother had watched the moon landing on this set.

In 1961, Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission infamously declared television to be “a vast wasteland.” Unfortunately, I’d have to wholeheartedly agree although I think the denunciation might have been fifty years too soon.

Newton Minnow receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. >>

TV from the golden age undeniably provided great value in entertainment and information. For many, television’s appeal was only as alluring as the programming of the moment. Perhaps the source of Minnow’s criticisms simply resulted from the cancellation of some of his favorite shows.

Are there any great inventions you feel are ‘wasted?'

How and what would you have changed concerning them?

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