Recording and Voice Processing, Volume 2

4Special Effects

With the rise of analog and then digital technologies in the music industry, new tools for processing or enriching the voice have appeared, such as the vocoder, the talk-box, auto-tune, Melodyne and vocal processors.

This final chapter presents these tools¹, which have become essential to transform, enrich, correct or finalize a vocal recording.

4.1. The vocoder

In 1968, the Canadian composer and musician Bruce Haack built one of the first vocoders intended for the field of music². At the same time, the famous American engineer Robert Moog, founder of the brand bearing his name, developed his own vocoder.

These two machines can be heard on the albums “The Electronic Record for Children” by Bruce Haack³ and “Clockwork Orange” by Wendy Carlos⁴.

It was not until 1974 and the use of the vocoder by the German group Kraftwerk, in their album “Autobahn”, that the general public became aware of this new instrument.

Figure 4.1. The album “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/reveillac/recording2.zip

From then on, the sounds of robotic voices produced by the use of a vocoder became very popular and are still common today.

Technically, we can consider that a vocoder is a device that cuts a vocal signal into narrow frequency bands and then analyzes the level present within each of these bands to give an instantaneous encrypted ...