Vocoder – A way to create a unique, robotic voice in your music (if you can’t sing really well, this is one option)

When Duke’s Library Takeout song went viral on Reddit in October of 2020, several commenters noted the use of a vocoder to create the singing voice. What is a vocoder and what creates the unique sound?

First, let’s a fix on the most famous songs using a vocoder so that you can recognize the sound of a vocoder in use…

Library Takeout
10 Most Famous Vocoder Songs

What creates the unique sound of a vocoder?

How To Vocode in FL Studio – Vocodex Tutorial
The Secret History of the Vocoder
“The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine.”
Vocoder – “The vocoder, short for voice encoder, is an offshoot of the voder (Voice Operation DEmonstrator), originally developed at Bell Labs in 1928, by Homer Dudley. By using both a buzz-generator with ten analog band-pass filters and a hiss generator (for sibilants), all controlled by fifteen mechanical keys and a foot-pedal, a trained operator, for the first time, could synthesize recognizable speech complete with voice inflections.”
Audacity Lesson 14 – Vocoder Effect

The Bode Vocoder was a classic, and replicated the sound first produced by the Moog synthesizer

Bode Vocoder 7702 Demonstration
Moog System 55 Modular Synth Demo by Daniel Fisher
Modular synthesis EXPLAINED

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