Folkways’ LP Speech After the Removal of the Larynx (1964, Folkways). This record demonstrates various techniques of speech without the larynx. Patients were concerned about “loss of personality” while being defined by a buzzing voice prosthetic. Contains the track “Frogspeech.” (Courtesy Steinski) (illustration credit 6.4)
In 1964, Smithsonian Folkways released the album Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, recorded at the Phonetic Laboratory of the Ear in the Netherlands. It was hosted by Dr. H.A.E. van Dishoeck, an expert in “Electro Nose Wings,” psychogenic deafness and house-dust allergies. Included was a recording of the Italian-made “Pipa di Ticchioni,” a pipe equipped with a pitch button and a transducer in its bowl. This clever device gave the illusion of smoking while speaking in a weed-eater timbre, as if providing its own surgeon’s warning.
Artificial larynx plugged into an organ and Theremin to play “Dusk In Upper Sandusky,” designed by F.A. Firestone, 1940. This could be an ancestor of Red, the homeless YouTube phenom who buzz-sawed like an Electrolarynx on “I Should Tell Ya Momma On You,” released on Stones Throw Records in 2009. (Courtesy Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) (illustration credit 6.5)
Dr. van Dishoeck explains that without a voice box to generate vibrations, words have to be expelled by breath or muscle contraction. One of his trickier demonstrations was an air-suck technique called “Frog Speech,” or Glossopharyngeal Speech. For contrast, van Dishoeck provides actual frog recordings, though the effect is more like a cricket making fun of a frog than a frog. Conversely, the manmade example of frog speech is more loyal to the pond while suggesting the shriveled parched Toadcoder heard on Kraftwerk’s 1975 song “Uranium.”
The liner notes of Speech After the Removal … include a photo of a farmer swallowing a frog, that locally quirked air of we-do-things-differently-round-here (see the 1973 film The Wicker Man). As one of earth’s oldest speaking creatures, the frog has certainly earned the right to occupy our throats, and it is no coincidence that the human larynx is frog-shaped. True frog clearance is an act of speech in itself, the “ahem of phlegm” that pronounces the air dead, the silence awkward, and the apparent obvious, a mucosal scramble of hint.
In 1940, F.A. Firestone published “An Artificial Larynx For Speaking and Choral Singing for One Person” in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Firestone described running a glass tube, a foot and a half long, from the mouth into a speaker unit plugged into a relaxation oscillator, a theremin, an organ or “other electric musical instrument.” (“Saliva traps are useful when protecting the diaphragms of both speakers.”) Songs tested on this machine included “School Days” and “Dusk in Upper Sandusky,” in which one could form speech from a trap drum solo.
A few weeks after demonstrating this rig, Firestone heard a similar effect on the radio. It was the Sonovox, a vibrating throat module that plugged into the studio console and essentially substituted instruments and recordings of heavy machinery for the voice box, converting modes of transportation into cloying pets and sidekicks. Treasured by yesteryear types and mastered by big-band guitarist Alvino Rey, the Sonovox was invented by Gilbert Wright one morning in 1939 while grazing the shadow on his neck with an electric razor.
Sonovox Jingles with Moog Synthesizer (1976, East Anglican Productions). Often mistaken for a vocoder, the Sonovox was a pair of vibrating speaker cones that attached to the throat, allowing Sonoveuxes to articulate the noise of planes, trains, and vacuum cleaners into speech. According to the Saturday Evening Post, the Sonovox could make wine say anything but “glug.” (illustration credit 6.6)
When contacting a representative from PAMS, a Dallas-based company that sells Sonovox jingles, I was immediately told that the vocoder sucks. Often mistaken for a vocoder, the Sonovox carried itself with a relatively clear and sunny disposition, a studio gimmick used in cartoons and radio commercials, from the pneumatic steam engines of Dumbo to an ad for Bromo Seltzer (nothing screams headache relief like a steam engine in your living room), and ultimately, counting down the week in the Who’s “Armenia City in the Sky.” The effect can be unintentionally frightening, as demonstrated by the nanny grilling the ice cream man in 1950’s The Good Humor Man. Peter Frampton and Richard Tandy of ELO recall hearing the Sonovox on Sparky’s Magic Piano, a children’s record about a talking piano who helps a kid cheat his way through Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”—the indestructible speech muse for The Green Hornet and the SIGSALY vocoder, as invented by the beekeeper himself, Homer W. Dudley. Up until then, Sparky was best known for being friends with Bozo the Clown.
A children’s record released in 1942, Sparky’s Magic Piano used a Sonovox to help a kid cheat his way through “Flight of the Bumblebee,” also muse of The Green Hornet. “I can play myself!” said the Piano, much to the horror of Seussian piano teacher Dr. T and his 5,000 fingers. The Sparky records would creep out future generations of electronic music nerds, from ELO to OMD. (illustration credit 6.7)
EEEEL LIKE I EWWW
Drool may be a friend to electricity, but it’s really here for the Rémy. It’s gathered in a clear plastic tube lodged inside Peter Frampton’s mouth. The tube runs southbound into a small metal box marked “Heil,” which is plugged into an amp onstage. The tube’s diameter is less than that of a garden hose but more than that of a crazy straw. It’s been marinating in Rémy Martin, so Frampton’s saliva glands are thrilled. Yet the main intrusion in Frampton’s mouth tonight isn’t the tube but the noise. His oral cavity has become a speaker and his teeth vibrate at a frequency that would purple a dentist. The rear molar, possibly #14, clenches the tube. The silver filling in bicuspid #21 hangs on for dear life. The guitar amp by Frampton’s foot transfers the wattage, happy to oblige for Frampton Comes Alive, the biggest selling live album of all time.
Imagine ice cubes and Doritos cracking up inside your head. Replace that with Madison Square Garden losing its voice. Replace larynx with guitar. Listen to teeth. Calcareous conduction. Frampton opens mouth, drool catches light and there it is, a word, or at least the shape of one. “Eeeeel.” Maybe not in the best shape, but close enough. The crowd is programmed to hear “Feeeeel,” so they do. By the third eel, there’s enough wattage in Frampton’s mouth to eject his silver filling and pop Afrika Bambaataa, standing in the front row at the Garden, right between the eyes. That would’ve been something: Bam walking home with Frampton’s filling lodged in his forehead, still vibrating with “Do You Feel Like We Do.”
Bambaataa did catch Frampton live to see the Talk Box, his jaw on the floor. “When I was younger, my mother would let me run around and go to concerts,” says Bam. “I couldn’t afford that top ticket so I had to sneak up to the front row. I had to see it for myself.” What he saw was a Talk Box, better known and recognized as “that thing Richie Sambora stuck in his mouth for ‘Living on a Prayer,’ ” and now used by Geico to sell car insurance.
With the Talk Box, one doesn’t talk but pantomimes, lip-synching like a drunken fish. Its principle is sixth-grade science fair: Bypass amp, pipe sound through tube, replace larynx with guitar or keyboard, turn mouth into speaker, hang on to teeth. “The Talk Box is an extra larynx,” Frampton continues. “You shut off yours and get piped-in larynx. It could be a guitar, it could be a synthesizer—anything that could be amplified and come out of the speaker and be bypassed and put through the tube. The Talk Box is analog and physical. It’s a warmer sound to me than the vocoder. It’s also much cheaper. Just a guitar plugged into an amp, bypass the speaker and put it in the Talk Box, up the mic stand and bingo. I’m pretty naïve to what a vocoder does. You’re restricted to a keyboard whereas you’re not with the Talk Box. You free up the larynx. The Talk Box’s got more soul. Flesh in the wires.”
Though Frampton is instantly recognized as a Talk Box icon, he refers to himself as a cover merchant, deferring to antecedents like Rufus, Sly Stone, Sly’s bass player Larry Graham, and Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh. “I did it my way and it happened
to be on two popular songs from the Seventies,” Frampton says. “I’m sure the Talk Box has been around since the Forties. Someone must’ve laid a book on a speaker, took the book off and it went wha? It’s such a simple effect. I’m sure there’s been a Talk Box ever since there was a microphone, a pre-amp, an amplifier and a speaker cabinet.”
Schematic of early talk box rig, circa 1940, using Theremin, records, organ, or “other electronic instrument.” This would evolve to guitars and, ultimately, the first ten seconds of “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith. (Courtesy Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) (illustration credit 6.8)
ON GOLDEN THROAT
The first Talk Boxes weren’t boxes but bags. In 1963, Doug Forbes was working in an electronics shop in Missouri when an old man came in speaking through a synthetic larynx. Forbes thought it was a vibrating tuna can. Wanting to fill his throat with guitar fuzz, Forbes then built a bagpipe prototype, essentially a hot-water bottle draped with “splendid green carpet with gold fringes.” Grateful Dead sound tech Bob Heil would follow in 1971, when collaborating with Joe Walsh for the more traditional tube-and-pedal model, making the Talk Box commercially available for $100. In 1976, the year Frampton released Frampton Comes Alive, Electro-Harmonix put its “Golden Throat” Talk Box on the market. The device had a fat red button that could’ve stopped a freight elevator, and its tube was indeed golden, though similar to an instrument of surgical discomfort. Peter Frampton first encountered the Talk Box via Pete Drake, a Nashville pedal steel player who used it in 1964 on Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock, and Teardrops” and then solo for “I’m Just a Guitar (Everybody Picks on Me),” released that same year. (Prior to Drake, another country act, Harry and the Troubadours, had recorded a Talk Box version of “Hey Jude.”)
Framptom met Drake during a session at Abbey Road Studios. “He said ‘Peter, check this out,’ and he stuck a tube in his mouth and the pedal steel started talking to me and I let out the nirvana yelp of delight. I asked where he got it. He said, ‘Well, Peter, I made one of these m’self.’ He was basically telling me, ‘Back off, don’t even bother looking for one. It’s mine.’ ”
Yet one could use the Talk Box to share larynges, like an analog ventriloquist. “If someone was singing I could actually have their voice,” says Frampton. “I’d have their voice mic split and come out of the PA and then come through into the amp through the Talk Box through my mouth. I could affect his voice while he’s singing and it’d be an addition to his voice. That’s sort of what you could do with the vocoder really, but this is so much more creative. I could take the lead vocal or backing vocal and stick my own vocals back through the Talk Box.”
As with the vocoder, intelligibility is no friend to the Talk Box. Frampton explains: “It’s raining and I don’t feel well’ becomes ‘There’s a terrible storm and an H-Bomb just went off.’ With ‘Show Me the Way,’ there’s no talking and singing. There’s no enunciation. ‘Do You Feel’ is where I start to experiment with talking and singing. On ‘Do You Feel,’ it’s perceived that I say, ‘I want to fuck you’ instead of ‘I want to thank you.’ Whether it is or it isn’t—is up to the listener.”
Fucked or thanked, it didn’t really matter to anyone who bought Frampton Comes Alive, the album that went platinum when released in 1976. This success called for champagne. “They used to sterilize my Talk Box tube by dipping the end in Rémy Martin. This would get me going for the evening. I’d have a taste for it. After the show, it was ‘Okay, where’s the Rémy?’ ”
Frampton remembers being in the back seat of a white Rolls-Royce with Sly Stone at the wheel, enjoying the excess of Talk Box stardom and making a fool out of the speed limit. “Sly was at the peak of craziness and I was at the beginning of mine,” Frampton says. “So it was pretty scary. It was 1976 and he wanted me to write. He drove me to Sausalito, to the Record Plant studios. He had an assistant in the front seat, and he was trying to open a beer while driving. It wasn’t a twist top. We’re going all over the road in a Rolls. He’d get a thought and say to his assistant, ‘Write this down! Write this down!’ It was like a movie. We arrive six hours late and he told her to go in and tell [everyone] he’d arrived. I’m the hugest fan. He’d go from one song to another quickly. He asked, ‘Can we play “If You Want Me to Stay?” He’s singing and playing it on bass and I’m noodling along on guitar. That was probably one of the finest moments of my career right there.”
NECK OF THE WOODS
Ned Gerblansky is a two-dimensional Vietnam vet who wants to be on the cover of Guns & Ammo. Appearing on the animated series South Park, Gerblansky lost his arm to a grenade, and his voice box to throat cancer. He spoke through an Electrolarynx and sang robotic versions of “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
COMPRESSED LEACH
Called TONTO, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff’s room-swallowing modular synthesizer would make a cameo in Brian De Palma’s 1974 film, Phantom of the Paradise, allowing the character Winslow Leach to speak after his head was crushed by a hydraulic record press.
MUPPET OF MY MIND
By the time Stevie Wonder got to Sesame Street, Cookie Monster had already crashed a stolen steam engine into a game show. A blue guy in overalls cried, “Hey, that’s my train!” A purple banker in whiskers asked for his cane. An orange thing ran around with jumbled fangs, his poof of eyebrows lifted from the forehead of Leonid Brezhnev. The show was Beat the Time, and its host, Guy Smiley, had lost control. He could be heard shouting Cookie Monster’s name as creatures frittered away nervous energy across the TV screen. A loose flap of hair leapt about Smiley’s head, a living thing itself, egging on the chaos. Cookie Monster was typically incoherent: a fuzzy bathroom rug with a rag-bag voice, trying to high-five the host (“Hi, Guy!”), his pupils jiggling everywhere at once, perhaps still feeling the effects from that appearance on The Dick Cavett Show when his stomach exploded after he ate a time machine.
Sesame Street special guest Stevie Wonder tried to make sense of it all, assembling this herky-jerky riot of felt and foam inside his head. What’s going on? Cookie Monster has stolen a train. Everybody okay?
No less confused was Sesame Street’s target audience (age six, gnawing on a Matchbox truck) when Stevie Wonder later appeared on the show with a plastic tube that appeared to drool, non-retractably, from his mouth and into a Moog synthesizer. Yet the tube’s most impressed demographic that day was Roger Troutman—a twenty-one-year-old from Hamilton, Ohio, who would spend the rest of his life sticking vinyl hardware tubing into his mouth.
Stevie Wonder had revamped the Sesame Street theme into something nastier than a grouch in a trash can, yet faintly redolent of a Honeycomb breakfast chant. Newfangled as the Talk Box seemed, it wasn’t a stretch for a children’s show where one learned to count (ah! ah!) and spell with animated noises (e.g., the letter B bouncing around to a vibes solo), where letters and numbers became characters, encouraging kids to hear things differently, if not reinvent them altogether. Sesame Street was musique concrète. Back then I would lip-synch to Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” but do the Talk Box solo by mashing my face into a Bjorn Borg tennis racquet, thinking the catgut grid would further convince the effect. (It helped that I wore a medieval anti-warp racquet press around my head.) To a child, the Talk Box was a tool of the avant-garde—as the Muppets of invention have often said, “It’s so crazy, it just might work!”
Yet Stevie Wonder’s Talk Box wasn’t a box but a bag—or “Blowbag”—designed by Malcolm Cecil, son of Edna, Gypsy Queen of the Accordion, and Robert Margouleff, a man who strapped his Moog to a hospital gurney. Margouleff and Cecil introduced Stevie to their monolithic TONTO synthesizer and won a Grammy for producing Music of My Mind in 1972.
HALFWAY HOUSE
In Robert Silverberg’s 1966 story “Halfway House,” Franco Alfieri must travel across several universes to find a cure for his throat cancer, ultimately replacing his voice box with a vocoder. Though vocoders were never actual
ly installed in nonfictional human throats, their pitch analysis function was used to study speech pathologies.
WATCH A MUG TAKE HOLD
Roger Troutman was the heart of Zapp, a selfless, garage-grown outfit from Hamilton, located between the funk hubs of Dayton and Cincinnati. Backed by his brothers Terry, Larry and Lester, Zapp would later enlist vocalist Shirley Murdock for additional songwriting. Shepherded by Bootsy Collins, who Roger met at age fourteen, and George Clinton, Zapp’s first three albums for Warner Brothers followed Led Zeppelin’s roman scheme (Zapp, Zapp II, Zapp III) and went gold. Bootsy would treat Roger to the stage when Parliament did two sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden, circa 1979. “They didn’t know who he was yet,” says Bootsy. “The record wasn’t out, and the Talk Box was unfamiliar territory. That was so funny to be there to watch a mug take hold of his audience.”
“You were forced to get tight touring with Roger,” says Vincent Calloway of Cincinnati’s Midnight Star. “He’d do anything he could to ‘get house’ from the audience. ‘You gotta get house,’ he’d say.” Often stealing the show with his borrowed voice, Roger was the consummate performer, whether standing on his head in nothing but a G-string during ten minutes of “More Bounce to the Ounce,” or backstage goofing around in an X-rated Donald Duck voice.
As a sampling legacy, Roger Troutman often enters the conversation with George Clinton and James Brown, though sadly he’s no longer around to hear about it. In April of 1999, Roger was shot and killed by his oldest brother, Larry, who then turned the gun on himself. The hip-hop media barely took notice despite Zapp being a gateway drug to West Coast G-Funk. (The Mini Moog plunge at the beginning of “Dance Floor” is the best cartoon slingshot on record.) Zapp was the reason why O’Shea Jackson figured that life would be more interesting if he started being Ice Cube. There should be a study on how Zapp’s 1980 hit “More Bounce” stimulated the automotive industry in California—Latino and African American—made, and manufactured in the Midwest. The cover of Zapp’s eponymous album shows exactly where this would go. Rendered in a Cray-Pas melt of pastels are the essentials: car keys, ocean, sunset and cassette (or “Zapp tape,” as it appeared in King Tee’s glove compartment, with the unregistered Glock). The only thing missing is someone to share it all with, and she probably just drove off with the band’s name, spelled in a fuse blowout of gold, for Roger’s homemade throat.
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