The Vocoder. The Talk Box. The Synth Vox. The much-reviled Auto-Tune. All ways of electronically altering the human voice, spoken, sung, or screamed. Effects that go beyond simple compression, chorus, reverb, delay, or distortion effects. The robot-sound. It’s a staple of modern music, though examples of its use date much further back in our musical history.

Simply put, the vocoder and its ilk all allow a musician to take a recording of the human voice, turn it into an electronic signal, and alter its pitch, multiply it into several different pitches, distort it, tweak its waveform, and altogether make it sound very little like the tone emanating from the original signer’s vocal chords.

Wendy Carlos used the vocoder to create the dystopian futurist neoclassical soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Electric Light Orchestra, Pink Floyd, The Alan Parsons Project, and Styx made famous use of vocoder technologies in the 70s and 80s, with tunes like Mr. Blue Sky and Mr. Roboto, (did they all start with mr? I wonder…). And of course, the grandaddy of electronic music Kraftwerk used the vocoder prolifically. Wikipedia’s page on the technology, in fact, features a photograph of Kraftwerk’s custom-made vocoder.

Then there’s Frampton and his talking guitar, but we won’t go there. Not tonight, at least.

Now we’re on the heels of the era of Auto-tune, a related technology originally used to find oil and natural gas deep in the earth, now used to disguise Kanye’s awful singing voice and transform it into something we all once reacted to with bobbing heads and the unison intonement: coooooooooooooool.

Then it became just too much and nobody wanted to tune into the Hip Hop or pop stations anymore on account of all the singing robots.

Neverthless, in the world of indie and electronic music, artists have historically and contemporarily used all of these technologies to stunning and transcendent effect. Tonight’s show features some of those tunes. Some are popular, some are quite obscure. All will make you bob your head and utter:

CoooooOOOOOoooooººººººooooOOOOOOL! *

*textual vocoding

Background Tunes: Charle Hunter Trio – Mistico