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Alan Parsons
Alan Parsons (born 20 December 1948) is a British audio engineer, musician, and record producer. He was involved with the production of several successful albums, including The Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be, as well as Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon for which Pink Floyd credit him as an important contributor. Parsons' own group, The Alan Parsons Project, as well as his subsequent solo recordings, have also been successful commercially.
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Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( ; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science and providing a formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, playing a significant role in the creation of the modern computer.
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Alvino Rey
Alvin McBurney (July 1, 1908 — February 2, 2004), known by his stage name Alvino Rey, was an American swing era musician and pioneer, often credited as the father of the pedal steel guitar. He was mainly associated with orchestral, big band and swing music, and towards the end of his career, jazz and exotica.
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Arthur C. Clarke
Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for the novel , written in parallel with the script for the , co-written with film-director Stanley Kubrick; and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
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Bruce Haack
Bruce Clinton Haack (May 4, 1931–September 26, 1988) was a musician and composer, and is considered a pioneer within the realm of electronic music. He was born in Alberta, Canada.
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Charles Barton
Charles Barton (May 25, 1902December 5, 1981) was a film and vaudeville actor and film director. He won an Oscar for best assistant director in 1933. His first film as a director was the Zane Grey feature Wagon Wheels.
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Giorgio Moroder
Hansjörg "Giorgio" Moroder (on record sleeves often only Giorgio) (born 26 April 1940, Gröden, Italy) is an Italian record producer, songwriter and performer. His work with synthesizers during the 1970s and 1980s had a significant influence on new wave, house, techno and electronic music in general. Particularly well known for his work with Donna Summer during the era of disco (including "I Feel Love" and Love to Love You Baby), Moroder is the founder of the former Musicland Studios in Munich, which was used as a recording studio for artists including Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Elton John. He also founded his own record label, Oasis Records, which later became a subdivision of Casablanca Records.
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Harald Bode
Harald Bode (October 19, 1909 – January 15, 1987) was a German engineer and pioneer in the development of electronic music instruments.
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Herbie Hancock
Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock (born April 12, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American pianist, bandleader and composer. As part of Miles Davis's "second great quintet", Hancock helped redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section, and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound. He was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace synthesizers and funk. Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieved success among pop audiences. His music embraces elements of funk and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz. In his jazz improvisation, he possesses a unique creative blend of jazz, blues, and modern classical music, with harmonic stylings much like the styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
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Homer Dudley
Homer W. Dudley (1896-1987) was a pioneering electronic and acoustic engineer who created the first electronic voice synthesizer for Bell Labs in the 1930s and led the development of a method of sending secure voice transmissions during World War Two.
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Isao Tomita
is a Japanese electronic music composer.
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Jean Michel Jarre
Jean-Michel André Jarre (born 24 August 1948) is a French composer, performer and music producer. He is regarded as a pioneer in the electronic, synthpop, ambient and New Age genres, as well as an organiser of outdoor spectacles of his music which feature lights, laser displays and fireworks.
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Jeff Lynne
Jeffrey "Jeff" Lynne (born 30 December 1947; Shard End, Birmingham) is an English songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, guitarist, and record producer who gained fame as the leader and sole constant member of Electric Light Orchestra and was a co-founder and member of The Traveling Wilburys. Lynne has produced recordings for artists such as The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and Tom Petty. He has co-written songs with Petty and also with George Harrison whose 1987 album Cloud Nine was co-produced by Lynne and Harrison. His compositions include "Do Ya", "Livin' Thing", "Evil Woman", "Turn to Stone", "Sweet Talkin' Woman", "Telephone Line", "Mr. Blue Sky", "Hold on Tight" and "Don't Bring Me Down".
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Lucille Ball
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, ''Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy''. One of the most popular and influential stars in America during her lifetime, with one of Hollywood's longest careers, especially on television, Ball began acting in the 1930s, becoming both a radio actress and B-movie star in the 1940s, and then a television star during the 1950s. She was still making films in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven ( (US) or (UK); ; baptised 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He is considered to have been the most crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.
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Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews (* November 13, 1926, in Columbus, Nebraska) is a pioneer in the world of computer music. He studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Sc.D. in 1954. Working at Bell Labs, Mathews wrote MUSIC, the first widely-used program for sound generation, in 1957. For the rest of the century, he continued as a leader in digital audio research, synthesis, and human-computer interaction as it pertains to music performance.
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Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday, FRS (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.
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Mike Oldfield
Michael Gordon "Mike" Oldfield (born 15 May 1953, Reading, Berkshire) is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age, and more recently, dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature. He is best known for his hit 1973 album Tubular Bells, launched Virgin Records, and for his 1983 hit single "Moonlight Shadow". He is also well known for his hit rendition of the Christmas piece, "In Dulci Jubilo".
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Red Rhodes
Orville J. Rhodes, better known as Red Rhodes or O. J. Rhodes (December 30, 1930 - August 20, 1995), was an American pedal steel guitarist. His mother taught him to play the Dobro at the age of five, but at the age of fifteen he switched to the steel guitar. He moved to Los Angeles in 1960 and became a session musician.
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Robert Moog
Dr. Robert Arthur Moog (, respell|), commonly called Bob Moog (May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005) was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
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Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life. He worked far beyond the confines of the Hollywood system, maintaining almost complete artistic control and making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in .
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The King Sisters
The King Sisters were an American big band-era vocal quartet.
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Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos on 14 November 1939) is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Several years prior, two Carlos compositions using classical (pre-Moog) electronic techniques had been issued on LP (Variations for Flute and Tape and Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers). Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
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Werner Meyer-Eppler
Werner Meyer-Eppler (30 April 1913–8 July 1960), was a German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist, and information theorist.
http://wn.com/Werner_Meyer-Eppler
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Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T; Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the research and development organization of Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T;).
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The Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich, Germany, is the world's largest museum of technology and science, with approximately 1.5 million visitors per year and about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology. The museum was founded on June 28, 1903, at a meeting of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) as an initiative of Oskar von Miller. The full name of the museum in English is German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology (German: Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik). It is the largest museum in Munich.
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The United States of America (also referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Caribbean and Pacific.
http://wn.com/United_States
- Access Virus
- Akai Professional
- Alan Parsons
- Alan Turing
- Alesis
- Alesis Ion
- Alesis Micron
- Alvino Rey
- analog signal
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Arturia
- Audio filter
- Auto-Tune
- band-pass filter
- Behringer
- Bell Labs
- Bruce Haack
- CELP
- Charles Barton
- classical music
- Clavia Nord Modular
- code
- comb filter
- CVSD
- Daisy Bell
- David Butler
- Deutsches Museum
- digital filter
- DigiTech
- disco
- DMX Krew
- Doctor Who
- Doepfer
- Dumbo
- Electro-Harmonix
- electronic music
- electronic rock
- Electropop
- Elsevier
- encoder
- encryption
- Ensoniq
- envelope follower
- Eventide, Inc
- filmmaking
- FIPS
- Five Miles Out
- formant
- Giorgio Moroder
- glottis
- Harald Bode
- hardware
- harmonic
- Harmonizer
- Herbie Hancock
- Homer Dudley
- human voice
- I Robot (album)
- IBM 704
- Image-Line
- Isao Tomita
- Jean Michel Jarre
- Jeff Lynne
- Korg
- Korg microKORG
- Korg MS2000
- Korg RADIAS
- Korg VC-10
- Korg Wavestation
- Kraftwerk
- KY-57
- linear prediction
- Lucille Ball
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Max Mathews
- MELP
- Michael Faraday
- microphone
- Mike Oldfield
- modular synthesizer
- Moog Music
- Mr. Blue Sky
- Mr. Roboto
- music
- Native Instruments
- New Age music
- Nyquist rate
- PAiA Electronics
- PAMS
- Pathé Newsreel
- Phase vocoder
- Pink Floyd
- Pop music
- progressive rock
- Prosoniq
- QE2 (album)
- Quasimidi
- Red Rhodes
- Resonance
- ring modulation
- Robert Moog
- Rock music
- Roland Corporation
- Roland JP-8000
- Roland SP-808
- Sennheiser
- Sibilant consonant
- Siemens
- SIGSALY
- Singing guitar
- software
- Sonovox
- soundtrack
- Sparky's Magic Piano
- special effect
- Speech communication
- speech synthesis
- Stanley Kubrick
- Stop consonant
- STU-III
- Styx (band)
- Sweet Talkin' Woman
- synthesizer
- synthpop
- Synton Fenix
- T-Pain effect
- Talk box
- TC-Helicon
- telecommunications
- The King Sisters
- The Raven (song)
- The Ventures
- The Voder
- train
- United States
- Vocal folds
- Vocoder
- Voder
- Voiceless consonant
- Waldorf Music
- Waldorf_Music
- Waves Audio
- Wendy Carlos
- Werner Meyer-Eppler
- World War II
- Yamaha Corporation
- Zoolook
- Zoom Corporation
Vocoder's
Releases by album:
Album releases
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:04
- Published: 17 Jun 2006
- Uploaded: 01 Dec 2011
- Author: reichmarshall
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:40
- Published: 27 Sep 2006
- Uploaded: 01 Dec 2011
- Author: macbookfan1
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:43
- Published: 03 Jan 2008
- Uploaded: 01 Dec 2011
- Author: radioshaolin
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:58
- Published: 07 Apr 2010
- Uploaded: 16 Nov 2011
- Author: TheFaderTeam
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:54
- Published: 21 Feb 2009
- Uploaded: 30 Nov 2011
- Author: jetdaisuke

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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:00
- Published: 23 Sep 2009
- Uploaded: 30 Nov 2011
- Author: AbletonInc
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:38
- Published: 11 May 2008
- Uploaded: 26 Nov 2011
- Author: Solaremusic
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:09
- Published: 23 Apr 2009
- Uploaded: 01 Dec 2011
- Author: alexarmens
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:23
- Published: 23 Sep 2009
- Uploaded: 30 Nov 2011
- Author: AbletonInc
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- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:13
- Published: 17 Apr 2008
- Uploaded: 29 Nov 2011
- Author: maycontaintraces
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Iran files complaint over purported US drone Al Jazeera
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Forget Embassy Wars, the Real War Is Over Memory WorldNews.com
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Russians stage mass protests against Putin, polls The Star
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Defense Authorization Act Will Destroy The Bill Of Rights WorldNews.com
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Euro crisis summit: The night Europe changed BBC News
- Ableton Live
- Access Virus
- Akai Professional
- Alan Parsons
- Alan Turing
- Alesis
- Alesis Ion
- Alesis Micron
- Alvino Rey
- analog signal
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Arturia
- Audio filter
- Auto-Tune
- band-pass filter
- Behringer
- Bell Labs
- Bruce Haack
- CELP
- Charles Barton
- classical music
- Clavia Nord Modular
- code
- comb filter
- CVSD
- Daisy Bell
- David Butler
- Deutsches Museum
- digital filter
- DigiTech
- disco
- DMX Krew
- Doctor Who
- Doepfer
- Dumbo
- Electro-Harmonix
- electronic music
- electronic rock
- Electropop
- Elsevier
- encoder
- encryption
- Ensoniq
- envelope follower
- Eventide, Inc
- filmmaking
- FIPS
- Five Miles Out
- formant
- Giorgio Moroder
- glottis
- Harald Bode
- hardware
- harmonic
- Harmonizer
- Herbie Hancock
- Homer Dudley
- human voice
- I Robot (album)
- IBM 704
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It was originally developed as a speech coder for telecommunications applications in the 1930s, the idea being to code speech for transmission. Its primary use in this fashion is for secure radio communication, where voice has to be encrypted and then transmitted. The advantage of this method of "encryption" is that no 'signal' is sent, but rather envelopes of the bandpass filters. The receiving unit needs to be set up in the same channel configuration to resynthesize a version of the original signal spectrum. The vocoder as both hardware and software has also been used extensively as an electronic musical instrument.
Whereas the vocoder analyzes speech, transforms it into electronically transmitted information, and recreates it, The Voder (from Voice Operating Demonstrator) generates synthesized speech by means of a console with fifteen touch-sensitive keys and a pedal, basically consisting of the "second half" of the vocoder, but with manual filter controls, needing a highly trained operator.
Vocoder theory
The human voice consists of sounds generated by the opening and closing of the glottis by the vocal cords, which produces a periodic waveform with many harmonics. This basic sound is then filtered by the nose and throat (a complicated resonant piping system) to produce differences in harmonic content (formants) in a controlled way, creating the wide variety of sounds used in speech. There is another set of sounds, known as the unvoiced and plosive sounds, which are created or modified by the mouth in different fashions.The vocoder examines speech by measuring how its spectral characteristics change over time. This results in a series of numbers representing these modified frequencies at any particular time as the user speaks. In simple terms, the signal is split into a number of frequency bands (the larger this number, the more accurate the analysis) and the level of signal present at each frequency band gives the instantaneous representation of the spectral energy content. Thus, the vocoder dramatically reduces the amount of information needed to store speech, from a complete recording to a series of numbers. To recreate speech, the vocoder simply reverses the process, processing a broadband noise source by passing it through a stage that filters the frequency content based on the originally recorded series of numbers. Information about the instantaneous frequency (as distinct from spectral characteristic) of the original voice signal is discarded; it wasn't important to preserve this for the purposes of the vocoder's original use as an encryption aid, and it is this "dehumanizing" quality of the vocoding process that has made it useful in creating special voice effects in popular music and audio entertainment.
History
Analog vocoders
Most analog vocoder systems use a number of frequency channels, all tuned to different frequencies (using band-pass filters). The various values of these filters are stored not as the raw numbers, which are all based on the original fundamental frequency, but as a series of modifications to that fundamental needed to modify it into the signal seen in the output of that filter. During playback these settings are sent back into the filters and then added together, modified with the knowledge that speech typically varies between these frequencies in a fairly linear way. The result is recognizable speech, although somewhat "mechanical" sounding. Vocoders also often include a second system for generating unvoiced sounds, using a noise generator instead of the fundamental frequency.
The first experiments with a vocoder were conducted in 1928 by Bell Labs engineer Homer Dudley, who was granted a patent for it on March 21, 1939. The Vocoder was introduced to the public at the AT&T; building at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. Dudley's vocoder was used in the SIGSALY system, which was built by Bell Labs engineers (Alan Turing was briefly involved) in 1943. The SIGSALY system was used for encrypted high-level communications during World War II. Later work in this field has been conducted by James Flanagan.
Voder
The Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator), an earlier speech synthesizer demonstrated in 1939, was an It consisted of a series of Oscillators using radio valves to produce tones, and gas discharge tubes to produce noise (hiss), the sound or output was modified using a series of filters. The filters were controlled by a set of keys and a foot pedal to convert the hisses and tones into vowels, consonants, and inflections. This was a complex machine to operate, and produce sounds similar to human speech. In 1948 Werner Meyer-Eppler recognized the capability of the Voder machine to generate electronic music.
Linear prediction-based vocoders
Since the late 1970s, most non-musical vocoders have been implemented using linear prediction, whereby the target signal's spectral envelope (formant) is estimated by an all-pole IIR filter. In linear prediction coding, the all-pole filter replaces the bandpass filter bank of its predecessor and is used at the encoder to whiten the signal (i.e., flatten the spectrum) and again at the decoder to re-apply the spectral shape of the target speech signal.One advantage of this type of filtering is that the location of the linear predictor's spectral peaks is entirely determined by the target signal, and can be as precise as allowed by the time period to be filtered. This is in contrast with vocoders realized using fixed-width filter banks, where spectral peaks can generally only be determined to be within the scope of a given frequency band. LP filtering also has disadvantages in that signals with a large number of constituent frequencies may exceed the number of frequencies that can be represented by the linear prediction filter. This restriction is the primary reason that LP coding is almost always used in tandem with other methods in high-compression voice coders.
Modern vocoder implementations
Even with the need to record several frequencies, and the additional unvoiced sounds, the compression of the vocoder system is impressive. Standard speech-recording systems capture frequencies from about 500 Hz to 3400 Hz, where most of the frequencies used in speech lie, typically using a sampling rate of 8 kHz (slightly greater than the Nyquist rate). The sampling resolution is typically at least 12 or more bits per sample resolution (16 is standard), for a final data rate in the range of 96-128 kbit/s. However, a good vocoder can provide a reasonable good simulation of voice with as little as 2.4 kbit/s of data.'Toll Quality' voice coders, such as ITU G.729, are used in many telephone networks. G.729 in particular has a final data rate of 8 kbit/s with superb voice quality. G.723 achieves slightly worse quality at data rates of 5.3 kbit/s and 6.4 kbit/s. Many voice systems use even lower data rates, but below 5 kbit/s voice quality begins to drop rapidly.
Several vocoder systems are used in NSA encryption systems:
(ADPCM is not a proper vocoder but rather a waveform codec. ITU has gathered G.721 along with some other ADPCM codecs into G.726.)
Vocoders are also currently used in developing psychophysics, linguistics, computational neuroscience and cochlear implant research.
Modern vocoders that are used in communication equipment and in voice storage devices today are based on the following algorithms: Algebraic code-excited linear predictive codecs (ACELP 4.7 kbit/s – 24 kbit/s) Mixed-excitation vocoders (MELPe 2400, 1200 and 600 bit/s) Multi-band excitation vocoders (AMBE 2000 bit/s – 9600 bit/s) Sinusoidal-Pulsed Representation vocoders (SPR 300 bit/s – 4800 bit/s) Tri-Wave Excited Linear Predictive vocoders (TWELP 2400 – 3600 bit/s)
Musical applications
For musical applications, a source of musical sounds is used as the carrier, instead of extracting the fundamental frequency. For instance, one could use the sound of a synthesizer as the input to the filter bank, a technique that became popular in the 1970s.
Musical history
One of the first attempt to divert vocoder to create music may be a “Siemens Synthesizer” at Siemens Studio for Electronic Music, developed between 1956-1959.In 1968, Robert Moog developed one of the first solid-state musical vocoder for electronic music studio of University at Buffalo.
In 1969, Bruce Haack built a prototype vocoder, named "Farad" after Michael Faraday, and it was featured on his rock album The Electric Lucifer released in the same year.
In 1970 Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog built another musical vocoder, a 10-band device inspired by the vocoder designs of Homer Dudley. It was originally called a spectrum encoder-decoder, and later referred to simply as a vocoder. The carrier signal came from a Moog modular synthesizer, and the modulator from a microphone input. The output of the 10-band vocoder was fairly intelligible, but relied on specially articulated speech. Later improved vocoders use a high-pass filter to let some sibilance through from the microphone; this ruins the device for its original speech-coding application, but it makes the "talking synthesizer" effect much more intelligible.
Carlos and Moog's vocoder was featured in several recordings, including the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in which the vocoder sang the vocal part of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony". Also featured in the soundtrack was a piece called "Timesteps," which featured the vocoder in two sections. "Timesteps" was originally intended as merely an introduction to vocoders for the "timid listener", but Kubrick chose to include the piece on the soundtrack, much to the surprise of Wendy Carlos.
In 1972, Isao Tomita's first electronic music album Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock was an early attempt at applying speech synthesis technique in electronic rock and pop music. The album featured electronic renditions of contemporary rock and pop songs, while utilizing synthesized voices in place of human voices. In 1974, he utilized synthesized voices again in his popular classical music album Snowflakes are Dancing, which became a worldwide success and helped popularize electronic music.
Kraftwerk's Autobahn (1974) was one of the first successful pop/rock albums to feature vocoder vocals. Another of the early songs to feature a vocoder was "The Raven" on the 1976 album Tales of Mystery and Imagination by progressive rock band The Alan Parsons Project; the vocoder also was used on later albums such as I Robot. Following Alan Parsons' example, vocoders began to appear in pop music in the late 1970s, for example, on disco recordings. Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra used the vocoder in several albums such as Time (featuring the Roland VP-330 Plus MkI). ELO songs such as "Mr. Blue Sky" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman" both from Out of the Blue (1977) use the vocoder extensively. Featured on the album are the EMS Vocoder 2000W MkI, and the EMS Vocoder (-System) 2000 (W or B, MkI or II).
Giorgio Moroder made extensive use of the vocoder on the 1975 album Einzelganger and on the 1977 album From Here to Eternity. Another example is Pink Floyd's album Animals, where the band put the sound of a barking dog through the device. Vocoders are often used to create the sound of a robot talking, as in the Styx song "Mr. Roboto". It was also used for the introduction to the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland.
Vocoders have appeared on pop recordings from time to time ever since, most often simply as a special effect rather than a featured aspect of the work. However, many experimental electronic artists of the New Age music genre often utilize vocoder in a more comprehensive manner in specific works, such as Jean Michel Jarre (on Zoolook, 1984) and Mike Oldfield (on QE2, 1980 and Five Miles Out, 1982). There are also some artists who have made vocoders an essential part of their music, overall or during an extended phase. Examples include the German synthpop group Kraftwerk, Stevie Wonder ["Send One Your Love", "A Seed's a Star"] and jazz/fusion keyboardist Herbie Hancock during his late 1970s period.
Other voice effects
"Robot voices" became a recurring element in popular music during the 20th century. Several methods of producing variations on this effect are: the Sonovox, Talk box, Auto-Tune, linear prediction vocoders, speech synthesis, ring modulation and comb filter.
Singing guitar
In 1939, Alvino Rey used a carbon throat microphone wired in such a way as to modulate his electric steel guitar sound. The mic, originally developed for military pilot communications, was placed on the throat of Rey's wife Luise King (one of The King Sisters), who stood behind a curtain and mouthed the words, along with the guitar lines. The novel-sounding combination was called "Singing Guitar", but was not developed further. Rey also created a somewhat similar "talking" effect, by manipulating the tone controls of his Fender electric guitar, but the vocal effect was less pronounced.
Sonovox
Another early voice effect using the same principle of the throat as a filter was the Sonovox. Instead of a throat microphone modulating a guitar signal, it used small loudspeakers attached to the performer's throat. It was used in films such as A Letter to Three Wives (1949), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), the voice of Casey Junior the train in Dumbo (1941) and The Reluctant Dragon (1941), the instruments in Rusty in Orchestraville, the piano in Sparky's Magic Piano, and the airplane in Whizzer The Talking Airplane (1947). The Sonovox was also used in many radio station IDs produced by PAMS of Dallas and JAM Creative Productions. Lucille Ball made one of her earliest film appearances during the 1930s in a Pathé Newsreel demonstrating the Sonovox.The Sonovox makes an even earlier appearance in the 1940 film "You'll Find Out" starring Kay Kyser and his orchestra, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre. Lugosi uses the Sonovox to portray the voice of a dead person during a seance.
Talk box
One of the earliest uses of a talk box appears in The Ventures' Christmas Album, released in 1965. In the song "Silver Bells", Red Rhodes spoke through a talk box, distorting the phrase silver bells.
Television, film and game applications
Television
Vocoders have been used in television production, filmmaking and games usually for robots or talking computers. The Cylons from Battlestar Galactica used the EMS Vocoder 5000 and a ring-modulator to create their duo-tone voice effects. The 1980 version of the Doctor Who theme has a section generated by a Roland SVC-350 Vocoder.
Models
Analogue vocoder models
Analog-Lab X-32 [32-band] Bode Model 7702 [16-band]
Hardware DSP vocoder models
Software vocoder models
See also
References
;Models ;Multimedia references
External links
Category:Audio effects Category:Electronic musical instruments Category:Music hardware Category:Lossy compression algorithms Category:Speech codecs Category:Cryptography Category:Robotics
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