It sounds so good, Roger says he wants to do it again.
So they do it again.
FREAKAZOID ALMOST STARTS RIOT AT OHIO STATE FAIR
Vincent Calloway, a black belt in purple glasses, does a roundhouse kick over the mic stand. Just loosening up. Across the fairgrounds, the third biggest cow in Ohio yawns. A kid at the Dairy Barn sneaks a twenty into his sock. The Bavarian rollercoaster cranks up “Hot For Teacher.” Summer of 1985 is winding down at the Ohio State Fair in Columbus. Calloway is now doing static isometrics, waiting for soundcheck.
A few weeks ago a woman spotted him at the airport, mummified in a scarf and purple tints and yelled, “There he is! That’s the Freak-A-Zoid!” She’d seen Calloway’s group Midnight Star performing their hit “Freak-A-Zoid” on BET. In 1984, when Midnight Star’s No Parking on the Dance Floor went double platinum, a Pentecostal reverend in Arkansas was concerned that the vocoder was turning his youth group into Freak-a-zoids.
“The vocoder can be soft and sexy or powerful and demanding,” says Reggie Calloway, the group’s co-founder. “ ‘Freak-A-Zoid’ is so powerful because of the way the vocoder is stacked. You can get a silky sound with strings or you can go ballsy balls-up with the Mini Moog. With the vocoder you have to have a voice. That’s why our vocoder had personality. It became more human, so to speak. An entity unto itself.”
Midnight Star’s inspiration for the vocoder was getting whipped by Zapp on tour. Reggie Calloway remembers being taunted by Roger Troutman during sessions at Fifth Floor Studios in Cincinnati. “He’d say, ‘You guys keep playing that pretty jazz music. Oh, that’s beautiful, mm-hmm,’ ” Reggie laughs. “That pretty music. We were into making everything sweet and perfect. After touring with Zapp, we changed our entire style. Roger taught us a lot inadvertently.”
Vincent Calloway, the vocoder freak-a-zoid of Cincinnati’s Midnight Star. Vincent first encountered a man speaking through an Electrolarynx while trick-or-treating as a child. “We grabbed our candy and got the hell out!” (illustration credit 6.14)
In Columbus, Ohio, the fairground speakers announce the start of a thermonuclear assault, through the vocoder: “Professor Faulkin could not reach you at three-five-three-two Cedar Road. We’re going to DEFCON One and will launch our missiles in twenty-eight hours, twelve minutes, thirty-two seconds.” Vincent Calloway quotes WOPR, the national defense computer of War Games. “My whole soundcheck was War Games.”
When Midnight Star actually take the stage, Calloway makes his PSA: “Freak-a-zoids, robots—please report to the dance floor.” Kids say, “No problem,” but tear down the fences getting there, giving Vincent flashbacks of almost being fatally crushed by a Jackson 5 mob at the Cincinnati Garden when he was ten. “I never experienced anything like that. It wasn’t like we were talking about anything crazy. Just freak-a-zoids.” That day at the fair, the police nearly arrest Midnight Star and their vocoder for violating Section 2917 of the Ohio Code—inciting a riot.
Vincent Calloway, after being inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame at age 50. While soundchecking with Midnight Star, Calloway would do roundhouse kicks over the mic stand while feeding lines from War Games through the vocoder. (illustration credit 6.15)
The Vocal Well Gods took the American president’s bet until they were warned about what tragically happened.
— Rammellzee
That is one hell of a gamble.
— JFK, 1962
John F. Kennedy used the KY-9 vocoder during the Cuban Missile Crisis when consulting with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Crypto-engineers said the KY-9 made the president sound like Donald Duck, the de facto diss for weird-sounding voices at the time. (Courtesy National Archives/NSA) (illustration credit 7.1)
THE MAC-JACK LINE
The brink of nuclear annihilation calls for sound advice over a secure phone line, at least one that works properly. On October 25, 1962, John F. Kennedy pushed the button and spoke on the vocoder. While his voice went to the machine, his body was at the pharmacy, infused with steroids, painkillers and anti-spasmodics. He heard a hiss of static and pushed again. At the other end, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan heard “garble,” not, “I don’t want to have an incident with a Russian ship tomorrow.” While the US Strategic Air Command was at a DEFCON 2 state of readiness—with no secure way to communicate with the ground—Kennedy’s Brahmin accent was being transformed into “Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck,” a side effect of processing the president’s vocal tract into a binary code. Talk of a “Naval interdiction” of all vessels bound for Cuba was compressed and artificially rendered at 1667 bits per second. The letter R was nowhere to be found.
Kennedy had been using the KY-9, a 500-pound 12-channel scrambler developed by Bell Labs in 1953. He often turned to the KY-9 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time when a single teletype exchange with Premier Khrushchev in Moscow could take over twelve hours between transmission, decoding and translation, while hung-over Soviet missile commanders sweated it out in submarines, or gingerly shuttled warheads across Cuba’s harrowing mountain terrain in the dark. Those thirteen days in October were so fraught with miscommunication, Intel glut and near-misses, it’s a wonder we’re even here to speculate. For the vocoder, there was no shortage of speech-energy breakdowns to analyze. According to transcripts of the Kennedy-Macmillan phone calls, garble came out as “ggrble,” as if near gerbil in frequency.
On October 22, after informing Americans about Soviet missile sites in Cuba, JFK called Macmillan in London and General Norstad, then stationed in Paris. Macmillan urged the president to work a compromise with Moscow (don’t invade Cuba) while offering support (activate sixty Thor missiles, tipped with US megaton warheads). Norstad, a former WW II pilot who believed “nuclear superiority had limited psycho-political meaning,” wanted to immobilize his Jupiter missiles in Turkey, bordering the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
The KY-9’s push-talk button was a source of irritation for John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (illustration credit 7.2)
That August, with Soviet cruise missiles and warheads already in Cuba, Harold Macmillan received a classified memo from his secretary Philip de Zulueta: “The Americans have developed a telephone scrambler which promotes secure transatlantic speech. The disadvantage is that the voices sound rather odd.” “Temperamental in its habits,” the KY-9 was referred to as the “Mac-Jack Line.” Conversations were often choppy at best, due to its push-to-talk (PTT) function—fine for buzzing in UPS, yet nerve-wracking on matters of national security. Kennedy would often forget to push or release, leaving dead-air interpretation, perhaps the illusion that he wasn’t being interrupted. Cryptography historian David Boak described the KY-9 voice as being artificially restrained. “You … must … speak … very … slowly,” he said.
The KY-9 cost $40,000 per unit and had all the charm of an Acme safe, a squat three feet high with a combination dial and light that flashed red for non-sensitive talk and green for crypto. Before activating the vocoder, users were required to say, “Go green!” Instead of sensitive vinyl records—as with SIGSALY—the code key was provided by computer punch cards, with a separate batch reserved for discussing nuclear retaliation. The KY-9 allowed the president to communicate directly overseas without the call being routed through the Pentagon, thus avoiding bureaucratic interference. He enjoyed how his private line aroused suspicion in the State Department, which had its own KY-9 system with separate clearance. If it malfunctioned, Fault Control was contacted and a small set of railroad tracks would release from the back, permitting the vocoder to be trundled out for maintenance. Said one technician, “There was absolutely no possibility of voice recognition.”
VISIBLE SPEECH
During the Cold War, when Sylvania wrote a missile jingle set to a Pepsi ad, Bell Labs devoted more attention to Anti-Ballistic Missile systems than vocoders. In 1964, the Soviet Union declined the invitation to attend the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, where the theme was “Peace Through
Understanding,” as the world was still flinching from being taken to DEFCON 2, along with Kennedy’s assassination. Since the Soviets had already put a dog in orbit before the US even got out of Florida, the Fair also emphasized space travel.
Bell Labs’ vocoder exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair, where Wendy Carlos first encountered the machine. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 7.3)
The success of Sputnik helped get The Martian Chronicles back in print. Ray Bradbury returned to the World’s Fair as an architectural consultant. Instead of crying at the fireworks, he found himself marveling at a fluorescent cloud of lightning bugs hovering over Queens. The robots in dinosaurs’ clothing were a nice touch, too. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Bradbury’s friend Isaac Asimov mused about frozen TV dinners and the future of “automeals,” robot breakfasts prepared by housekeepers powered by radioisotopes. Disney unveiled its animatronic creatures (including the Abraham Lincoln simulacrum that inspired Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You), IBM computers translated Russian into English, and the Bell system offered more free long distance, transmitted, somewhat clearly, at 600 bits per second. Those who enjoyed the sheer pleasure of having their voices dismantled could attend the vocoder exhibit over at Bell’s “Floating Wing,” a Millennium Falcon–like structure. “Watch this fascinating experimental machine sample your voice, take it ‘apart,’ put it back together again and play tricks with it.”
Invented by Dave Coulter in 1963, EVA (Electronic Voice Analogue) created artificial speech from visible speech patterns drawn by electromagnetic conductive ink. After seeing the demonstration at the 1964 World’s Fair, the NSA would purchase EVA from Coulter for speech encoding research only to junk the machine in a scrap yard in Marlboro, Maryland. (Courtesy Frank Gentges and Dave Coulter) (illustration credit 7.4)
Avoiding the Talking Flashlight over at the Sermons from Science exhibit, one could also check out Electronic Voice Analogue (EVA), a “Visible Speech” synthesizer that said, “I enjoy the simple life” to anyone within earshot. EVA was essentially a formant vocoder married to a chart-reading machine. Its voice was created by spectrograms, speech waves traced onto Mylar paper by conductive ink. Based on the Swiss-made OVE (Orator Verbis Electris), EVA was invented by Dave Coulter, a key vocoder engineer and consultant to various federal agencies during the Cold War. Obsessed with synthetic speech since hearing the Voder say “extraordinary” at the 1939 World’s Fair when he was seven, Coulter had been working as a cryptology engineer for Melpar, a defense contractor in northern Virginia that specialized in electronic warfare and weapons simulators.
Dave Coulter (left) being congratulated on his formant vocoder at Melpar, circa 1968. Melpar was contracted by the US Army for vocoder R&D. Known as “The Hairlip Machine,” this vocoder tracked and synthesized formants—the energy concentrated around a speech sound that helps compose the frequency spectrum. (Courtesy Frank Gentges and Dave Coulter) (illustration credit 7.5)
Bell Labs’ vocoder demonstration at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, circa 1964. (Photo Courtesy Archives, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago) (illustration credit 7.6)
The EVA demonstration at the World’s Fair impressed children and the NSA, who purchased the machine for secure voice research only to ditch it in a scrapyard in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. There, Coulter would randomly discover his invention years later, still coherent and harboring a stack of classified satellite photos.
MOOG DROOGS
In 1971, Dave Coulter’s 15-year-old daughter Annie told him she was going to a midnight showing of Fantasia and saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange instead. While Annie sat in the theater watching Malcolm McDowell being tortured by a vocoder version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, her father was in his basement vocoder lab, stretching and mangling phonemes for the State Department. (A childhood friend of Annie’s remembers the lab’s massive Bat Cave computers and the “strangest disembodied voices” that haunted the Coulter household.) Conservative and pro-Vietnam, Coulter not only banned his daughter from seeing Kubrick’s film, he didn’t want her listening to Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack, the experience of being drowned by a Moog synthesizer, if not the future itself. Ultraviolence on reverb was a bleak departure from Carlos’ popular Moog debut, Switched-On Bach. Annie Coulter may be the first case of a teen rebelling against her father with vocoderized Beethoven instead of Mick Jagger.
A physics PhD from Cornell, Robert Moog had been seeking Dave Coulter ever since reading a published Army report on the latter’s Melpar research in 1964, when Moog was in the early stages of building modular synth legos for recording studios. Moog had implemented Coulter’s tunable formant into his synthesizer, allowing it to emulate human sounds. “Bob was always going off on tangents,” says Walter Sear, an engineer who worked closely with Moog. “The vocoder was a distraction when the company was going broke. It wasn’t marketable.”
Another Moog associate, Jon Weiss, remembers feeding Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos through the vocoder and getting a “splendid ethereal reformulation.” This synthetic derealization of classical music would anticipate the vocoder’s breakthrough with Carlos, a Columbia physics/music composition student and one of Moog’s most proactive collaborators. “That vocoder was a prototype we worked on together,” says Carlos on the phone from New York. “It was experimental, a little crude, and far less costly than several later commercial ‘luxury’ vocoders.” (By 1977, commercial Moog vocoders—designed and impoved by Harald Bode—fetched used Volkswagen prices at $5,900, just less than half of what EMS was charging.)
Carlos had been fascinated with the vocoder since seeing it at the 1964 World’s Fair:
They had a visual display with a pitch follower so you could sing into it. It could detect the pitch and little bulbs would light up on a musical scale to show you what pitch you were hearing. They’d harness someone from the audience to come up and talk and sing as well. And I got nailed to do that. They would raise the pitch, to a chipmunky sound or down to a Darth Vader effect, and ask, “How are you?” or “Why are you here?” Like a dopey television quiz program—nothing that needed to be saved for posterity. But I found it whimsical and affectionate. I set aside in my mind that some day, some way, I wanted a vocoder!
The words how to wreck a nice beach, spoken through a Korg VC-10 vocoder and transformed into a spectrogram’s visual frequency bands by Wendy Carlos. “The chordal pitches made a darker lower region while the white-noisy audio gives more spatterings up above in the graphs,” said Carlos in an email. (Courtesy Wendy Carlos) (illustration credit 7.7)
Carlos attended the exhibit six times. A year later she met Bob Moog at an annual convention for the Audio Engineering Society, at which attendees were allowed to check out new technologies displayed at the World’s Fair. After being shown the control booth for synchronizing fountains and fireworks to music, Carlos impatiently burst, “Alright, where’s the vocoder?” “They said, ‘Oh, you’re right beside it.’ And there was a large beige molded fiberglass cabinet that reached up to my chin, with sloping, streamlined sides,” she continues. “You only saw a couple of switches and a power light that was on. It was quiet. I pressed my ear against it, but could hear no fans. Of course—solid state!”
Bell Labs’ 16-channel vocoder filter bank circa 1960, condensed from SIGSALY’s 2500-square-foot vocoder. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 7.8)
“You meet the strangest people these days when you happen to be carrying a vocoder around with you,” Wendy Carlos once told me. “Ever notice that?” I once emailed Wendy the Who’s Sonovox track “Armenia City in the Sky,” and she responded with a “visible speech” spectrogram of the track, followed by a spectrogram of some of her early vocoder tracks, which at first glance appeared to be a procession of electrocuted caterpillars.
“She is a brilliant person,” says Kai Krause, a former vocoder consultant for Sennheiser and a tech friend. “She’s a great inspiration for sonic i
llumination.” Back in the late Sixties, while working as a studio engineer in New York, Carlos was introduced to the Eltro, an “information rate changer” made in Germany that manipulated tape playback using special rotating heads to stretch or shrink time. It could also alter pitch without affecting the playback duration. “We used it to speed up or slow down commercials to fit in their exact thirty-second or sixty-second spots.” Among the Eltro’s clients were the US government, the Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, Virginia, and Stanley Kubrick, who forever endeared himself to my mom when he used the Eltro for HAL’s lobotomy in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL’s drool-speed version of “Daisy Bell” was essentially a lullaby sung to me in the crib when I was an infant. Kubrick’s script collaborator, sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, had visited Bell Labs in 1962. While trying to determine how a phone booth would look in outer space, Clarke overheard an early IBM computer singing “Daisy.” Bell Labs would release this computer voice demo on 10-inch vinyl the following year.
Extended Voices: New Pieces For Chorus and For Voices Altered Electronically by Sound Synthesizers and Vocoder (1967, Odyssey Records). Features Alvin Lucier’s “North American Time Capsule,” one of the first vocoder songs to be somewhat commercially available on record. (Courtesy Patrick James Longo) (illustration credit 7.9)
Wendy Carlos explained HAL’s voice in terms of running toward the back of a moving subway car. “The Eltro at first was used to gradually drop the pitch without changing the duration. HAL’s voice then slows down as the playback time expands. Very few Eltros were produced and sold. People have hypothesized all manner of extremely intricate fabrications that are fun to read but horseshit. The reality was simple and rather elegant.”
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