Hardware vocoders – both dedicated and incorporated into otherwise traditional synthesizers – are also still being made, such as the Korg Minikorg, Arturia MicroFreak, and Behringer VP-340, which is a clone of the Roland VP-330.The Ableton vocoder is a versatile effects unit cable of doing the famous vocoder fx of old like the Kraftwerk / Daft Punk-esque ‘robot-voice’, and much more. Vocoders continue to be popular in music production, thanks to Daft Punk and other artists keeping alive the traditions of classic dance music. Vocoders were also employed as sound design tools for television shows, such as the voice of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, and in movies.
They were accompanied by an explosion in use in recorded music, first by artists like Giorgio Moroder and Electric Light Orchestra and later in R&B and electro. While there were a few nascent attempts at one-off vocoders, such as the Siemens Synthesizer in 1956 and the one built by Bob Moog for Wendy Carlos and used on the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange, by the late ‘70s there were quite a few on the market, including the EMS Vocoder 2000, Sennheiser VSM-201, Moog 16 Channel Vocoder, Roland SVC-350 and VP-330, and the Korg VC-10. Herbie Hancock with a Sennheiser VSM-201. This way, pitch information can be applied, making the human voice appear to ‘sing’. The carrier can be a separate instrument or an oscillator housed within the vocoder itself. While the original vocoder used noise and later filters to approximate formants at the carrier stage, musical vocoders replace them with synthesizers. The modulator (usually a human voice but not exclusively) is broken into a number of frequency bands.
Musical vocoders function in much the same way as the old telecommunication version.
While vocoder telecommunications technology has continued to improve and in fact is still broadly in use in today, musical applications for the vocoder are a different story. Redubbed SIGSALY and with the help of one-time-use random noise records to act as unbreakable codes, Dudley’s vocoder was finally put to use. The idea was shelved until World War 2 when the Allied forces needed a way to secure trans-Atlantic conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill. Unfortunately, the vocoder as designed by Dudley had no pitch information (remember, the carrier was just noise) so intelligibility became an issue.
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