So crazy became bugged, the bugged picked up the vocoder, rappers went under surveillance, and we listened very carefully, under headphones.
Bam continues chuckling through the NSA brochure, the towel now over his head. He hits a circuit diagram and doubles back to the Pentagon, the glowing basement and the turntables. The room looks busy yet unoccupied. He wonders where they stuck that joker. Perhaps somewhere near the world’s most accurate clock. Or next to the Sumo air conditioner that kept the entire system from melting down. Or maybe behind the oven that stabilized the crystals that kept the turntables in synch 10,000 miles apart. Those capacitors have some explaining to do.
By 1943, there were two turntables and a vocoder in the Pentagon and a duplicate system in the basement of a department store in London. As the war machine kept turning, vocoders and turntables would be installed in Paris, Brisbane, Manila, Frankfurt, Berlin, Guam, Tokyo, Oakland.
Oakland?
Signal Corps officers on the turntables at the SIGSALY Paris Terminal, code name SAMPLE, circa 1944. The records played throughout vocoded conversations to ensure voice security. SIGSALY was the first transmission of digital speech. (Courtesy National Archives) (illustration credit fm.7)
Another one, on a barge that tailed General Douglas MacArthur around the Philippines. And another, under a mountain in Hawaii. If a satellite zoomed in on the northern bump of the African Zulu medallion hanging from Bambaataa’s neck, one could see General Eisenhower checking out two turntables and a vocoder in a wine cellar in Algiers.
In the fall of 1983, the Zulu Nation funk sign began appearing on my spiral notebooks, its index and pinkie horns shooting lasers at whatever subject crossed its path. “Shazulu” became the code for “Latin Vocabulary Homework” which I did for a seventh-grade classmate in exchange for vocoder record money. (He would whisper over his shoulder from the desk in front of me: “You got that shazulu?”) I would then launder the cash through Shazada Records in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Pentagon vinyl was far more rare, guarded with life but destroyed by protocol once the needle lifted. Bambaataa wonders if any of it survived. This was a world where turntables were controlled by clocks, not people. Where privacy was distinct from secrecy and a digit was referred to as a “higit.” Where torpedoes were equipped with 500-watt speakers and records played thermal noise backwards behind nameless doors. Where speech must be “indestructible” and the voice wouldn’t recognize itself from hello. So it’s not unreasonable to think that turntables and vocoders once kept the snoops out of Churchill’s whiskey diction.
Bam, often just headphones away from some version of deep space, is not surprised. He once named an album Warlocks and Witches, Computer Chips, Microchips, and You, his old playlists being a conspiracy theory themselves. To him, it’s William Burroughs, Gary Numan and Vincent Price who are the real vocoders. In a sense, everything is bugged.
Bam mutters something about “Leviathan” and scans through the NSA appendix. There’s a transcript of Bell Labs President O.E. Buckley speaking through a vocoder in Pentagon Room 3D-923, July 1943, when Special Customer was first activated:
We are assembled here today to open a new service—Secret Telephony.… Speech has been converted into low-frequency signals that are not speech but contain a description of it.… Signals have been decoded and restored and then used to regenerate speech nearly enough like that which gave them birth.… Speech transmitted in this matter sounds somewhat unnatural.
Bambaataa descrambles a frog in his throat, a matter of clearance in itself. Somewhat.
“We hope that it will be a help in the prosecution of the war,” said O.E., signing off.
And so we bug.
The time for the robots had come. So they got busy.
— Carol Greene, The New True Book of Robots
O MOM AND DAD
A man from AT&T has pulled Ray Bradbury’s lucky ping-pong ball out of a barrel. The loudmouth in glasses just won a free long-distance call to anywhere in the United States but Queens. He’ll be speaking with his parents in Los Angeles and three hundred strangers will be allowed to eavesdrop—a boast of reach and clarity, courtesy of the phone company. This deprivation of privacy doesn’t concern Bradbury, the know-it-all at eighteen.
AT&T’s complimentary scheme was a huge draw at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. Free long distance was good in July of 1939. Free was good for Ray Bradbury, who had hot water and ketchup for lunch, called it tomato soup and didn’t care because he’d met Isaac Asimov and a man who drew giant ants.
That summer, the World’s Fair was an optimistic golly between the Great Depression and World War II. Apprehension was confused with giddiness, as Hitler had already invaded Czechoslovakia before the Czechoslovakian pavilion was even completed. By the Fair’s second season, France had fallen and the queue into the Perisphere, snap-brimmed and scarved, could’ve been boarding the next planet out of here. When the Fair closed, in October 1940, the World of Tomorrow was dismantled and the scrap metal skipped the modern kitchen to be recycled for the war machine.
This future would be quickly assessed in “Galactic Report Card,” a story in which aliens went around grading the planets. Written by Bradbury’s friend Forrest J. Ackerman, the story is approximately one letter in length—Earth is handed a decisive “F.” Ackerman shared Bradbury’s weakness for abominable puns and paid for the bus trip from Los Angeles so the author of “Don’t Get Technatal” could join him at the first annual World Science Fiction Convention in Manhattan. Afterward they would go to Flushing to see how the Fair sized up against their full-blown imaginations, less interested in the canary that tested refrigerants at the GM building than Dalí’s topless squid ladies.
The future would be like this: a drunk passed out in a simulated front yard. There were miniature freeways and manmade lightning. Model homes and model cities. Artifice was in. At the Firestone Farm, men in headsets triggered barnyard noises. Oinks, ribbits, lows, clucks and grunts. Yawps, quacks, chirps and peeps. Chimp hysterics. Birdtalk. The real animals weren’t really into it. The real monkeys got sick and the real ducks ate most of the real frogs.
“Anybody out there?” People were allowed to eavesdrop on Ray Bradbury’s free phone conversation at AT&T’s Long Distance Exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.1)
Setting new standards for nerding out, Ackerman wore a space toga and spoke Esperanto. He told people he was a time traveler from the future, a future where he would star in Nudist Colony of the Dead, coin the term “Sci Fi,” and become L. Ron Hubbard’s literary agent. Bradbury, the street-corner paperboy, wandered the paved swamps of Queens hyping Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a film in which Germany out-futured the Fair in just under two hours, and without sound. Unlike Metropolis, the Fair offered no robot beauty. Just Elektro, an eight-foot clunker that could smoke cigarettes and hiccup. Canned and recorded at 78 rpm, his human voice betrayed the novelty.
“The robots weren’t exciting,” Bradbury told me over the phone from Los Angeles. “But the architecture was. I never much cared for robots. The robot was an idiot.”
AS IF TO SAY
You flower of untimeliness, you rabbit of dark rooms! Your voice is our hereafter, and it has crowded out heaven!
— Arnolt Bronnen, addressing the telephone, 1926
My call to Ray Bradbury lasted twenty-seven minutes, cost about $10 and informed me that the eighty-five-year-old author would always take the stegosaurus over the robot. We talked about synthetic mice that cleaned houses and laughed at Albert Brock, a man driven insane by his telephone. “The phone drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality.” That’s Brock’s voice in Bradbury’s words, from a 1953 story called “The Murderer.” To Mr. Brock, get the phone meant feeding it to the InSinkErator. “It wasn’t the technology,” says
Bradbury. “It was the voices. Albert Brock was anti-interference!”
Though the phone often gets the blame, people in the gaslight era weren’t accustomed to receiving speech from inanimate objects, unless it was Edison’s phonograph (billed as a talking machine itself), but certainly not a tube that originated from a vibrating pig bladder and platinum. In 1876, the pinhole gulf between voice and voice box would expand, infamously, when Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro received his first phone call and, in a confused burst, exclaimed: “My God! It talks!”
Always in the market for a confused burst, Bell Labs would name its articulate keyboard “Pedro” when it was introduced at the World’s Fair in 1939, in both New York and San Francisco. (“Facsimile Versus the Code Philosophy in the Transmission of Speech” cost too much oxygen.) Officially, Pedro was a Voice Operating DEmonstratoR, or Voder, a keyboard that simulated speech while alienating the voice from its mechanism, the human body. The Voder was a novelty outgrowth of the vocoder, then being investigated for speech privacy systems, described by the Hopewell Herald as “Goldarnedest … the Versatile Daddy.”
The Voder demonstration at the 1939 World’s Fair. A manually operated electronic speech synthesizer, the Voder could sing, page lost husbands, and be corny—perhaps its most human attribute. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.2)
Crowd bugging out on the Voder at the 1939 World’s Fair, New York. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.3)
Played by telephone operators, the Voder’s chubby keys provided the phonetic transcription of consonants and vowels while foot pedals dictated the tonal shading and pitch. Speech was sourced from two basic oscillations: buzz and hiss. The buzz—which originated in a “relaxation oscillator”—accounted for voiced sounds (vowels and vibrations). The hiss derived from an electron free-for-all in a vacuum tube and was responsible for unvoiced sounds, breath flushed from the lungs through the teeth, lips and tongue. The air was in the electricity.
In an attempt to put a face to the voice, AT&T commissioned a painting for its awkward star, somewhere between Art Deco and Dilbert-headed, with a receding Ludwiggian brow offset by golden squiggles of phone cord (hair) and a loudspeaker stuffed in its astonished rabbit hole.
The media response to the Voder ranged from droll (“the talking wall”) to freak-show hysteria (“The Terrifying Metal Man”). Its most human quality wasn’t so much the ability to talk and sing but an instinct for corny banter, thus making it a huge draw at the Fair. The machine could answer simple questions and chat up the Firestone Farm. It could drawl. It could twang. It could page lost husbands. It could say “non-intercommunicability.” It could mimic a woodpecker headbutting a telephone pole. It tried to put a baby to sleep but couldn’t say “lullaby.” (Double l’s were difficult and hell was out of the question.) When presented with larger freight like “potentiometer,” the Voder stumbled groggily, like a darted bear. When one inebriated customer dared the machine to say “Aberystwyth,” the Voder seemed to mock the word, testing the bounds of elasticity. A visiting class of blind schoolchildren was utterly charmed.
According to Bell Labs, the Voder required a “peculiar combination of particular talents which are not too common.” Telephone operators trained a year to make the machine coherent and sometimes wore translucent sleeve protectors called “Cuff-Ettes.” (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.4)
For all its gimmickry, the Voder was difficult to manage, a male persona played by women, whose voices were considered too high-pitched to be recognized by the vocoder itself. Only trained telephone operators, the disembodied voices of the switchboard, had the hand-ear coordination to give the machine the social skills to work the room, a sort of remedial Speak & Spell. A simple phrase (“I am not wearing a bear suit”) called for deft key and foot-pedal movements. Intelligibility proved to be a challenge when machines weren’t expected to speak in the first place, much less respond in Latin.
(Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.5)
During its developmental stages at Bell Labs, the Voder would often club its syllables with an involuntary whoomp and zizz. At one point, a simple “yes” was transmuted into the word “peanuts,” no less muddled than Charlie Brown’s PTA.
“It’s a wonder that the Voder could talk at all,” wrote its inventor, Homer Dudley, in the Bell Technical Journal. Homer’s daughter, twelve-year-old Jean, was not impressed. “Oh-ah-eh,” she says, in the key of blah-blah, now living in upstate New York. “The Voder was boring.” Jean and her younger sister Pat had come to the World’s Fair to play in the Perisphere and eat the free cheese from Holland. “I wanted the Voder to sound like a real person. I enjoyed it the first ten times but then it got tedious. What impressed me was my father got us in for free.”
Voder practice model from 1938, photographed at Shannon Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, 2009. According to Homer Dudley, the Voder’s inventor, J.Q. Stewart of AT&T built the first electric speech keyboard in 1922. (Courtesy AT&T Labs and Shannon Laboratories) (illustration credit 1.6)
FOR ILIAD D’OH
Open the door, Homer.
— Bob Dylan
Homie, please open the door!
— Marge Simpson
Homer W. Dudley invented the vocoder when he realized his mouth was a radio station while flat on his back in a Manhattan hospital bed, eyes on the ceiling, a goldfish as his witness. It was October 1928, a year before the stock market fell on its head. The end of the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Germany had electromagnetic tape. Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T, had already broadcast Herbert Hoover’s forehead on a televised signal. They had also sent a fax, invented negative feedback, and coined Quality Assurance—the nebulous back-pat of automated speech recognition menus, less assurance than a promise that someone in a building without windows was eavesdropping.
The radio inside Dudley’s mouth was no whim of dental conductivity, falling for that old hygienist’s tale about catching baseball games in cavity fillings. He was considering the carrier nature of speech and the frequency of muscular vibrations produced by the vocal tract. Ralph LaRue Miller, who joined Dudley in the Bell Labs Acoustics Research Department in 1929, remembers the story. “Homer was in the hospital, gazing at the ceiling and fiddling around with his mouth—that’s when the real dawn came. He suddenly realized, well, I don’t know if it was sudden or not, but he realized that your mouth really is a miniature radio station. The vocal cords are your transmitter and the shape of your mouth is the thing that shapes the wave. He realized that the motions of your mouth and tongue were very slow, much slower than the frequencies that came out.”
Homer Dudley plays the Voder in 1978. Dudley thought the Voder could be used to “point out a moral from a telephonic viewpoint.” (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.7)
Dudley, a thirty-two-year-old speech engineer from the Shenandoah Valley, just wanted to transmit speech underwater. With new improvements on the transatlantic cable—rumored to have suffered a Kraken attack during its construction on the ocean floor in 1866—it was then possible to cram more telephone conversations within a given bandwidth. Dudley thought the articulatory motions of the tongue, lips and mouth could be electronically mimicked, being far more sluggish and lower in frequency than the speech sounds they produced. Thus a “specification” of speech—its spectral information—could be transmitted over transatlantic links, allowing ten phone channels to occupy the space of one. Though Dudley imagined his robot in every American home, the reduced bandwidth was canceled by the cost and the garble, as well as space hogged by the machine itself—as if every American home could have its own vocoder room.
Homer Dudley’s lab notebook from 1928, with Physical replaced by Transmission. Includes “Results from the Artificial Head.” Dudley began his frequency compression research in 1927. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.8)
Bell Labs vocoder schematic. In his patent 2,243,089 (System for the Artificial Production of Vocal or Other Sounds), Homer Dudley described the “effect of a giant or large animal talking under control of human speech.” (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 1.9)
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