How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  If fear could be read in the spectral analysis of the voice, composer Boris Yankovsky might’ve been able to isolate its frequency. During the Great Terror of the Thirties, when Stalin was busy eliminating his enemies through forced confessions, Yankovsky achieved breakthroughs in speech decomposition and “re-synthesis.” Close to building his own vocoder, Yankovsky had to abandon his research when the avant-garde was denounced as radical. All it took was a voice over the phone, a useful instrument of dread ever since Stalin took power in 1929.

  Appropriately, The First Circle began with a wiretap. A recording of the conversation is sent to the Marfino prison, where the suspect is to be identified through a voiceprint “phonoscopy.” While fellow inmates raced to decode the voiceprint, Solzhenitsyn would spend much of his zek time deconstructing three volumes of Dahl’s Russian Dictionary. This research, which he called “Relative Frequency Speech Analysis,” would get him transferred to a special Acoustics Brigade with his friend Lev Kopelev, a Marxist polyglot and fan of the Mayakovsky poem “A Cloud in Trousers.”

  The Marfino vocoder was cribbed from Bell Labs, using laboratory equipment that had been looted from European companies like Philips and Lorenz. Analyzing the fidelity and clarity of raw syllables, Solzhenitsyn and Kopelev listened to recordings of zeks reading Pravda articles, some of which slandered the Yugoslav rebel Josip Tito, informants and formants alike. These were combined into test phrases for clarity: “He looked, he leapt, he conquered.”

  Over in Laboratory No. 7, Solzhenitsyn’s friend Dimitri Panin went nuts over the fusion of dialect and thermodynamics. While trying to create his own “Language of Maximum Clarity,” Panin earned himself a solitary year in vocoder production, to his satisfaction. Marfino’s cryptography guru, Professor Timofeyev, would urge Panin to give his vocoder specs to the Kremlin, assuring his freedom. Panin responded by setting his work on fire. The vocoder was Panin’s “engineering triumph,” a tribute to mental stamina after he had survived more than a decade in the gulag system, mostly in the labor camps near the Arctic.

  In the spring of 1950, the chief of Special Prison No. 1 designed a vocoder prototype and asked Solzhenitsyn for an evaluation. Solzhenitsyn panned the chief’s design, calling it weak, and was expelled from Marfino, but not before torching his own vocoder diagrams. Transferred yet again, the Walrus ended up in a red cattle car with Panin, en route to more labor camps, stomach cancer, exile, reinstatement, literary fame, more exile, and Vermont. The dictionary went with him.

  THE LAST RESORT

  In 1984, while Solzhenitsyn was living in the US, Stevie Wonder’s keyboard tech, Gordon Bahary, released the 12 inch “Siberian Nights,” under the alias Twilight 22. Issued on Vanguard Records, it was a mediocre electro song about deportation in darkness. At one point, “work” is chanted no fewer than eighteen times. That same year, Bahary recorded a virtually unknown single called “The Dark Side” under the alias Zero Hour. It ends with the vocoder channeling the Russian dirge “Song of the Volga Boatman.” As a teenager, Solzhenitsyn had traveled the Volga in a canoe, witnessing famine and blight, Stalin’s policies at work.

  During the Big Bug Fifties, when movies depicted Communists as giant ants, the Kremlin denounced any Soviet praise of American teknik. By then the United States had fallen suspect to another paranoid Joe, this one a senator from Wisconsin. One of Senator McCarthy’s more ardent subscribers was Homer Dudley, inventor of the vocoder. Dudley’s protégé, Manfred Schroeder, learned this when he was hired by Bell Labs after immigrating to New York from Germany in 1954. “There were two things Homer Dudley liked to talk about,” says Schroeder. “The Communists and the vocoder. I didn’t have the words at my fingertips in those days, but today I would call him a right-wing nut. He thought the State Department was infested by Communists.”

  Manfred Schroeder served on a German artillery target acquisition unit during the war, identifying blips in the fog. At times, Russian POWs manned the guns in exchange for food. “They were Communists; they were nice people,” he says. “When Sputnik went up in 1958, Dudley came to my desk with the following idea. He said the Russians could not put up a satellite like that and the beep-beep-beep that people heard around the world, coming from Sputnik, was just an electronic fakery.”

  Working with Dudley in the acoustics department, Schroeder would consult The First Circle while developing his own voice-excited vocoder—the first of these machines to actually sound human. Demonstrating for his associates, Schroeder assumed that his vocoder could be understood, only because he’d been listening to it all day, the same pratfall that occurs in The First Circle. Struggling between intelligibility and just hearing things, he noted its annoying habit of turning a phrase. “How to recognize speech” sounded like “How to wreck a nice beach.”

  “People will go to any length (and width) to be unintelligible,” wrote Schroeder in his book Computer Speech: Recognition, Compression, and Synthesis. So much for the Language of Maximum Clarity.

  In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn compared speech encoding to disassembling a beach and then re-synthesizing it at another location—essentially transposing a summer getaway as if it were a Soviet munitions factory on the run. He called it “an engineering desecration,” the equivalent of pulverizing a southern resort into grits, sticking them into a billion matchboxes, shaking them up and then flying them to a different sector for reconstruction. “A re-creation of the subtropics, the sound of the waves on the shore, the southern air and moonlight.”

  The sand in your shorts, the bad radio reception, the copper tonality, the jellyfish parachute squishing between your toes, the effervescent fizz of unvoiced surf. The burning red sun. For the zeks at Marfino the vocoder could make getaways out of sentences, if only inside their heads. A gulag prison term, an imagined escape. The last re-sort, a desperate scramble. As if Solzhenitsyn had burst from his lab table in a flock of schemata, his beard tangled with headphones, denouncing the artificial beach. Somebody had to say something.

  Bell Labs’ Manfred Schroeder, inventor of the Voice-Excited Vocoder, photographed in his New Jersey home with Jonzun Crew’s Lost In Space LP. When conducting intelligibility tests with the vocoder, Schroeder liked to use the word Aztekenexpresszuggesellschaft (“Aztec train operating company”). (illustration credit 3.3)

  We are but the shadows of still more shadowy things.

  — Kenneth Patchen

  THE BEAST FROM 20,000 TONS OF TNT

  In the summer of 1949, it appeared that an amusement park had crashed into Venice Beach. Construction for new attractions was underway. On an ice cream stroll with his wife Maggie, twenty-nine-year-old Ray Bradbury saw the coils of an extinct rollercoaster, sad with rust and seaweed, and called it a washed-up dinosaur. Having married someone who believed dinosaurs still ruled, Bradbury’s wife went with it. In the distance, a lighthouse belched.

  Two years later, the Saturday Evening Post published “The Fog Horn,” Bradbury’s story of a hard-up Rhedosaurus who mistakes a fog horn moan for romantic interest and clobbers a lighthouse in frustration. At the time, a commercial for Lifebuoy soap used a Sonovox and a foghorn for a sustained “B.O.” signal. (Homer Dudley had already dedicated a paragraph to fog horn articulation in vocoder patent 2,339,465, filed in 1944.) This blast from a docker’s armpit made gulls plunk dead from the sky and so became one of radio advertising’s most memorable hooks.

  In 1953, “The Fog Horn” was adapted for the screen as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Bombed out of bed by the Cold War—and not having had sex for a million years—the creature went to New York and adjusted Manhattan’s Kong insurance and then lumbered over to Coney Island, only to be shot with a nuclear isotope and “die like an opera singer” in front of the Cyclone. The Beast had been brought to life by incredibly patient stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, a close friend of Bradbury’s who blew up model U-boats for Navy training films while serving in the US Signal Corps. During the war, Bradbury had happily failed his Army physical after bei
ng diagnosed as too blind for combat, leaving him free to squint at the future from the safety of his typewriter. “I went into the future and never came back,” he tells me. “I started out in the center of the earth. Then I went to Mars.”

  Robot-mouse cleaning as pictured on the cover of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, adapted with vocoder for a BBC Radiophonic Workshop radio play in 1977. (illustration credit 4.1)

  Unfortunately for Mars, Bradbury brought some Earth baggage along with him. His nuclear fears would manifest on a Godzilla scale of destruction while inside the quiet comfort of the last house standing on the red planet—empty, automated and in complete denial. In 1950, while America habituated to postwar convenience and Popular Science celebrated robot servitude, Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles, which included “August 2026,” a story where the ultimate efficiency home meets the ultimate efficiency weapon. Like those who live alone, the house talks to itself while conducting the day’s business, preparing an Olympian’s breakfast as synthetic voices chirp about overdue bills and the weather forecast: “Galoshes and raincoats today!”

  After the robot cleaning mice complete their chores, the house lights a cigar and asks for any poetry requests. Room cleared, it defaults to “There Will Come Soft Rains” by the poet Sara Teasdale, reciting it down to the last singing frog. It posed a rhetorical question: Would Nature care if man ceased to exist, with technology subbing in for Nature, as if man couldn’t help himself? The frogs answer no.

  “My wife had read me that poem. I was so touched that I ran home and wrote the short story. During that time, they reproduced photographs of buildings in Hiroshima. People were photographed against the walls of their houses. All that was left was the shadow where they’d been standing.” Accordingly, the eastern flank of Bradbury’s Martian house bore the silhouettes of its occupants, along with the shadow of a child’s ball, fried in mid-arc.

  In August 1945, the vocoder continued to play the dehumanizer—in SIGSALY’s voice timbre (the laryngectomee’s monotone) and with the casualties themselves, the subtraction of a population. Earlier that summer, at the Trinity test site, Manhattan Project physicist Robert Oppenheimer was in the process of chain-smoking himself to cancer, the lump in his throat malignant, his voice box in no better condition than his conscience. Though General Stoner had ordered the SIGSALY transcripts from Hiroshima to be immediately destroyed, one anonymous Signal Corps officer recalled hearing two words through the vocoder. “Hell-Bomb.” The spectral description of speech had described what could not be imagined, a carbonized human outline in a ghost town. The shape of things to come.

  According to Malcolm Clarke, he was hired by the BBC for his pronounced two-minute burps. Clarke’s award-winning vocoder adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “August 2026” originally aired in 1977. (illustration credit 4.2)

  KEEP ME WELL AWAY FROM THE NAKED LIGHT

  In 1977, the British Society of Authors awarded Best Drama to the BBC Radio adaptation of Bradbury’s “August 2026.” In the credits, top billing went to the vocoder and the show’s producer, Malcolm Clarke, a man believed to have “cornered the market in deteriorating states of mind.” Clarke was employed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, established in 1958 to provide customized sound effects for radio and television shows like Doctor Who, Dr. Quatermass and The Goon Show. The Workshop was stashed in a skating rink near a zoo in Westminster, in a building said to have looked like a mildewed wedding cake. “I always heard of the Radiophonic Workshop, but I never knew it was anywhere you could go,” says Peter Howell, a composer who used the vocoder for Doctor Who as well as a gurgling trip inside the body. “I thought it was something that just existed.” Less a studio and more of a foxhole, the Workshop was known for innovation that transcended its peanut-butter-and-jelly budget. Personnel constantly raided redundant shops for equipment, improvising and embellishing their Philips tape machines and turntables. “It was always on ‘beg, borrow and steal,’ ” continues Howell. “The stuff nobody wanted.”

  The Radiophonic Workshop annoyed parents and frightened children within the same cosmic scream. They filled orders for an oscillation for the end of the world, “a high hum of pure agony,” the rustle of man-eating plants, Daleks exploding into “screaming jelly,” and the sound of an office building flying through space in the grip of seven powerful tractor beams. The BBC switchboard was jammed with curiosity. “People were genuinely open-mouthed about this stuff when it came out,” says Howell. “It’s difficult to believe, but it was something they’d never heard before. It was an interesting time because we were just as wide-eyed about it as the public was, really. It’s just we were privileged enough to get our hands on the [equipment] and fiddle around with it.”

  In 1969, the Workshop hired Malcolm Clarke based on his ability to burp for the better part of two minutes. He would be immortalized in Radiophonic lore when recruited by Workshop head Delia Derbyshire for a radio play of Aristophanes’ The Clouds. (A gastronomer himself, Aristophanes once punctuated speeches with hiccups.) “She needed a stomach-rumbling mating-fart ritual dance,” says Clarke over the phone from his London home. “So I spent a half-hour swallowing air. I did one out right on the green cue light. It went on for nearly a minute. It was a beauty.”

  Derbyshire, the tape loop genius, was impressed. Clarke had outdone himself. “I hope my burp is still in the library, because I made myself feel quite ill doing it,” he told me. “It had nothing to do with diet. It’s entirely done by skill and virtuosity. Keep me well away from the naked light, I’ll tell you that!”

  Malcolm Clarke had learned to convert his stomach into a studio via an esophageal speech technique used by throat cancer patients. “I was interested in how they’d teach laryngectomy patients to swallow air and bring it up. Once they brought up the air, they use the burping sound to articulate words. When you burp your vocal cords don’t play any part in it. It sounded quite vulgar, but at least people could speak.”

  Clarke was first introduced to his gift at the age of six while growing up in Leicester, England, city of vice, bingo and great potato chips. To treat his whooping cough, Clarke’s parents would wheel him down to the gas works, where he’d sit in his push-chair and inhale. “Gas is a rich source of harmonics. When you’re first faced with a vocoder, it’s kind of a reverse-synthesis thing. You’ve got to put in more than you need in order to get intelligibility out. You need something that’s got lots of harmonics in it in order that the rest of the gubbins that comes in after the sound can modulate it. The richer the sound, the more intelligibility comes out of the vocoder. There are a lot of low harmonics in the burp, which might be a nuisance. Your imagination is much more talented than the reality because once you get some stomach rumbles together, they’re not as exciting as you think.”

  MAJESTIC HORRIBLE NOISES

  In 1976, a massive piece of electronic furniture appeared at the Workshop, with “cheeks of teak” and armrests. This was the EMS 5000 Vocoder, a £10,500 machine that could detect the difference between a noise and a sound. “You couldn’t avoid it,” recalls Peter Howell. “It was a very unusual shape—higher at the back and all the controls were tipped toward you. When you first came to it, it certainly looked weird and wonderful because it just had interesting labels on it, like Frequency Shifter and Pitch Extractor.”

  According to Howell, the EMS vocoder allowed them to control the consonants separate from the vowels. (“You could turn down the consonants and they sound as if their teeth had dropped out.”) While trees were “too polite,” Clarke would often rile up the vocoder using external noise recordings of steam trains and roadwork. “A talking concrete mixer is very rich. You can filter it and make it talk. It’s a horrible noise but very interesting. Loud mechanical things were ideal. I don’t think there’s anything purely electronic that hasn’t owed itself to nature and nature usually does it better. [Nature] has more imperfections in it. As humans, we like the imperfections. You’ll always have a reference to what happens in n
ature. Even if it’s completely outlandish, it has to relate somehow.” While suffering through a management training course, Malcolm Clarke daydreamed about vocoders (“I was desperate to get back to it”) and read Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles to cope with the separation. “ ‘August 2026’ is about the death of a house. I thought we could do the whole bloomin’ lot electronically.” However, it was hard to keep actors from scrunching their noses when speaking through the vocoder. “Actors are lovely people, but when it came to using the vocoder, they are suspicious animals. They think their performance is going to be destroyed. They were determined to behave like robots and I couldn’t stop them. I said, ‘Look, this is in the year 2026, we don’t sound like Daleks!” Just because there would be electronic voices in the future doesn’t mean that humans wouldn’t make sense.”

  This EMS Synthi 100 Vocoder went to the WDR in Cologne while the BBC tackled the 5000. In a letter to Malcolm Clarke, Ray Bradbury wrote, “The sound you imagined and the quality you gave my robots was truly amazing.” Bradbury asked if the BBC would release it on LP, along with another vocoder story for the B-side. The Dust Witch balloon attack from Something Wicked This Way Comes would’ve been ideal for unvoiced hiss energy. (illustration credit 4.3)

  “The vocoder is not man’s best friend,” adds Peter Howell.

  Clarke remembers the vocoder being unforgiving when it came to artifacts between speech sounds. “When people speak they tend to generate sounds, which are not going to be helpful. The vocoder assumes that every sound that goes in there is speech—be it a splutter, plosive, script rustle, studio atmosphere, unwanted mouth noise or fart. It will translate in its own terms. Any extraneous sounds were translated by the vocoder into speech-like sounds, which became very confusing.”