Retrofuture.com

If anything the vocoder has become more of a fixture in popular music in the ten years since this article was published.

A little-known inventor named Homer Dudley has pumped new life into the career of Cher. Sixty years before her comeback single “Believe,” Dudley invented the vocoder, the device which recently transformed Cher’s singing voice into a robotic-like timbre.

The origin of vocoder is far removed from the world of pop music–originally Dudley was hoping to improve phone service. But he quickly ascertained that the vocoder (or voice coder) possessed a creative potential far beyond the transmission of phone calls. In fact, the device proved to be of crucial importance World War II, scrambling transoceanic conversations between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Years later it was resurrected by hipster musicians looking to lend a futuristic ambience to a track including Laurie Anderson (“O, Superman”),  Kraftwerk (“We Are the Robots”) and the Beastie Boys (“Intergalactic”).

But it’s safe to say Dudley had something less glamorous in mind when he invented the device at Bell Labs in 1936.

Dudley had a long and productive career as a researcher into the nature of speech and its transmission,” points out Sheldon Hochheiser, corporate historian of the AT&T Archives. “The vocoder is his best known achievement.”

How did his invention work? Dudley discovered that if you broke speech down into its basic components they could be transmitted over a narrow bandwidth. He designed an electronic device that took speech signals, divided them into component parts, analyzed them through a filter, and then re-synthesized them at the receiving end.

In effect, Dudley had figured out how to synthesize sounds. And, thus, he quickly ascertained the vocoder (or voice coder) had creative potential beyond the transmission of phone calls.

To publicize his breakthrough, he created an offshoot called the Voder for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Using a trained operator who manually pressed keys to produce sounds, the Voder (or voice operation demonstrator) could transmit complete intelligible sentences and imitate the sound of various farm animals.

The public was reportedly mesmerized. “The Voder can do practically anything the human voice can do,” claimed the New York Times in a front page article in early 1939, “from producing the lowest pitch of eight or ninety cycles to overtones up to almost 10,000 cycles. It can also sing.”

The musical capabilities of the vocoder took a backseat to more pressing matters during World War II. But the device proved to be of crucial importance, scrambling transoceanic conversations between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

After the war, electronic music pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen began to recognize the vocoder’s musical potential, employing the device in experimental compositions. In 1971, the vocoder entered the pop culture mainstream when Kubrick invited composer Wendy Carlos to score the music to his controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Employing a vocoder to “sing” on “Timesteps,” Carlos produced a classic of early electronic music.

A product of the communications revolution, the vocoder has become a perfect fit for artists seeking a “new millennium” sound. Its trance-like effect has elements of human warmth but also a decidedly metallic tone.

More recently, the otherworldy effect has shown up in work of Air, Daft Punk, and Beck. But it took Cher’s hit “Believe” to bring the vocoder to the fore of popular music. Reportedly, Cher’s producers were initially reluctant to use the vocal effect. The pop diva held firm, insisting they could change it over her dead body. “And that,” Cher told the New York Times “was the end of the discussion.”

Time will tell if we’ll thank Cher or curse her but thanks the vocoder has gone from a relatively obscure invention by a guy named Homer Dudley to becoming the sound of 1999.