Homer Dudley’s Invention: The weird way a 1930s science project transformed modern pop music
Even if you don’t fully understand what it is, you’ve probably heard the robotic voice effect of a vocoder on a pop hit, and the questions might start rattling around in your head, wondering exactly how it’s made.
To be fair, it’s a very good question, and you only need three components in order for one to function properly: a carrier, a synthesiser and a modulator. The vocoder then reshapes the voice that is used as input and applies it to the synth, which then goes on to make alterations to the pitch. You can speak or sing into the vocoder, and it’ll do all of the rest of the hard work for you, turning a simple and potentially tuneless vocal input into a chord or sliding scale.
However, the real question is how someone even came up with the concept of making the instrument in the first place, and the key here is to forget that it’s even an instrument at all. In fact, its creator, Homer Dudley, an electronic engineer from the US, designed it in the 1930s as a means of transmitting speech over long distances, with the goal of sending spoken messages across the Atlantic for communication between the US and Europe.
The issue with this was that the amount of data that needed to be transferred was too much for any machine in this period to process, so what the vocoder did was decode it and reconstruct it at the receiving end through robotic speech. The name ‘vocoder’, or ‘voder’, as it was originally known, is a portmanteau of ‘vocal decoder’, and this is how Dudley intended for it to be used, so how did it end up becoming a device that is so commonplace in popular music?
With the vocoder, you can use it as a primary carrier of melody in a song due to how the pitch is changeable with simple inputs, but at the same time, it can be used to create an additional harmonic layer on an existing vocal, whether human or synthesised. Because of its robotic and futuristic sound, it has ended up being prominent in electronic music, or any form of popular music that specifically looks to evoke the feeling of being futuristic or alien.
While early synth pioneers such as Robert Moog and Bruce Haack were among the first to develop and utilise vocoders in a musical capacity as early as the late 1960s, it would eventually get picked up by mainstream artists, with Sly & the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder becoming some of the earliest artists to discover its usability in a musical context.
Jump forward to the 1990s, and French house duo Daft Punk began using it even more frequently, with it being front and centre in songs such as ‘Around the World’ and ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’, where a human voice is replicated by a more modernised version of Dudley’s machine.
There have, of course, been other inventions developed in the years since which produce a robotic effect that can be used to alter human vocals, with the talk box and vocal harmoniser often being confused for a vocoder when used in songs, but the fascinating thing about the vocoder remains that it was never intended for use in music, it just happened to be perfect for it. Dudley’s science project ended up successfully transmitting messages as he had wished, and as a fortuitous byproduct of that, he changed pop music forever.
