The reality was inside the space helmet of Mission Commander Dave Bowman, his breathing compatible with the uphill huff of Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France,” had its 45 rpm been downshifted to 33, with HAL expiring just before crooning, “I permit you to use the brake.” The bicycle had been pitched into the muckspit, leaving us on foot and in deep space, somewhere outside Jupiter.
In 1970, two years after the release of 2001, Carlos saw Colossus: The Forbin Project, a Cold War science fiction film featuring the first paranoid supercomputer to speak through a vocoder. A nosy, overbearing control freak, Colossus polices sex and alcohol consumption, forms an alliance with its Soviet counterpart (GUARDIAN) and blackmails mankind with nuclear warheads. “Colossus is a much more frightening talking computer than HAL, which may be partially due to the vocoder,” suggests Carlos. “Forbin Project was the first movie that I recognized for certain used one. By its release I had my own vocoder. And it hit me abruptly—the synchronicity—that this is an idea whose time has come! A year later I discovered Stanley was interested in everything, open and curious. Over dinner one evening I had to give him a description of the workings of a typical vocoder.”
We can build you: Bell Labs Speech Synthesis Kit, 1963. This DIY voice machine was part of a promotional campaign as Bell Labs began using computer models of synthetic speech, from the automatic digital recognition (Audrey) to the Charles Dodge LP, Synthesized Voices, released in 1976. (illustration credit 7.10)
From a whisper to a scream: Droogs play a game of Telephone between takes on the set of A Clockwork Orange (Warner Bros, 1971). (Courtesy Stanley Kubrick Estate) (illustration credit 7.11)
Some listeners had an “emotional resistance” to artificial voices, creating a robot stand-off, of sorts. Carlos explains:
People at first hated our synthesized singing. I watched good friends who enjoyed my synthesized instrumental sounds turn squirmy. They visibly winced. I proposed composing an additional work for the album, one to precede Beethoven, and so Timesteps was born. Timesteps featured a gradual easing-in on the notion of singing synthesizers. By the time they reached the Ninth Symphony it didn’t hit them in the face the same way. Not that the vocoder and synthetic speech were state secrets—now they’re almost clichés. But they certainly were cutting-edge, and highly unusual at the time.
In A Clockwork Orange, the Beethoven vocoder is first heard at a record store, where Alex DeLarge picks up two girls, skipping the John Fahey LP and 2001 soundtrack (a nudge to the eyeball in the bins) and goes home for a Benny Hill speed orgy. Beethoven later returns when Alex undergoes the Ludovico Treatment in the theater, his eyes peeled open by speculum.
Carlos had recorded unused tracks, many containing the vocoder, for other scenes. She explains: “There was the elaborate ‘Biblical Daydreams’: three interwoven musical themes for the prison library episode, accompanying Alex’s darkly perverted ‘olde tyme’ fantasies. The most significant was Country Lane, a long, complex cue highlighting the vocoder, that was composed for the scene in which the older Droogies, now cops, meet and savagely beat Alex.” Police beatings, perversions and record stores—a nice way to introduce the vocoder to America.
By 1974, Annie Coulter was seventeen and the beef with her father had evolved from censoring droog beatdowns to his support for Nixon and the war in Vietnam. That year they attended a Robert Moog lecture at the Audio Engineering Society and approached him afterwards. Moog was excited to finally meet Dave Coulter, thanking him for inventing the tunable formant that wound up in his synthesizer and, ultimately, in A Clockwork Orange. More thrilled was Annie Coulter, upon discovering that her dad might be kind of cool, despite himself.
WHEN YOU SAY NASTY WORDS
Smile death fraud pit gill charge hot pod frown
In 1971, Homer Dudley, the seventy-five-year-old inventor of the vocoder, hit the beach in Hawaii and went surfing. That year NASA and Magnavox paid good money for someone to say, “Smile when you say nasty words” through a vocoder. This description of speech was compared to cockpit noise inside a Boeing 707. At the time, the Federal Digital Voice Processing Consortium was evaluating a secure voice standard for all branches of the US Armed Forces. “Smile when you say nasty words” was part of a series of tests conducted at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the main switch of AUTOSEVOCOM, a global network of vocoders fielded during the Vietnam War. At Huachuca’s Automated Articulation Test Facility, recordings were analyzed for phoneme extraction and intelligibility.
Sub chuck beach cuss gust fate folk nook mange
As engineers for the Naval Research Laboratory, Dave Coulter and his partner Frank Gentges would subject their formant vocoder to these tests. The recordings were sent to a blind listening jury at the University of Texas, where students volunteered to skip class and spend the afternoon flooding their headphones with third-grade vocoder rhymes: “A noise annoys an oyster,” seashells, and assorted Myrtle Beach trinket backwash.
Knee puck rip bought cloud chute earl corpse sludge
“We ran a Vocoder Confusion Matrix on them,” Gentges says. “The relationship to reality was not very good.”
Spectral analyzers photographed at Metavox Laboratories in Great Falls, Virginia, run by Frank Gentges and Dave Coulter until Coulter passed away. Not pictured: the vacuum tank used for simulating conditions in outer space which now serves as a shoe dryer. (illustration credit 7.12)
This will lead the world to more sound and fury.
— Vocoder test sentence, prepared for Goddard Space Flight Center, 1971
FULL METAL THROAT COAT
The vocoder was on precarious terms with reality throughout the Vietnam War, a time when human speech often masked actual events and planes dropped portable radios from the sky. Cold War policy encoded in the airwaves translated to tactical confusion in the jungle. To the grunt being shelled in a spider hole, Narrowband Ciphony was just compression.
In 1968, a sixteen-channel vocoder sat on board the USS Bon Homme Richard, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. Called MF STEAMVALVE, it digitized outgoing calls from commanders to the Pentagon and other ships, processing daily air strikes into bits of 1 and 0. In the mess hall one floor above, the ship’s crew shared their lunch with bombs, which were sliding and bumping around beneath the tables, waiting to defoliate Vietnam. There was nowhere else to put them. Frank Gentges sat below in Radio Central doing quality assurance on the vocoder, while ordnance rumbled above his head. “I was quietly working on my vocoder while above me aircraft loaded with bombs were being shot off the ship with a catapult,” he says.
As the designer of STEAMVALVE and engineer for Rixom Electronics, the 25-year-old Gentges had been assigned to Yankee Station, a triangulation of carriers deployed in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 1964, Tonkin was the site of an imaginary Vietminh PT-boat attack, some hokey Intel quickly branded an incident, allowing President Lyndon Johnson to publicly wage an undeclared war on communist aggression, a policy secretly backed by the US since the early Fifties. By the time Gentges arrived at Yankee Station in 1968, more than half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam.
The STEAMVALVE system was the Naval crypto-voice connection to the Pentagon as the US tried to bomb its way out of an eleven-year foreign policy morass. One of the Navy’s better acronyms, STEAMVALVE stood for Secure Tactical Electronic Amplitude Modulated Voice Actuated Long-range Vestigial Emanations. The encryption key generator—TSEC/KG-13—subsisted on voice bits instead of vinyl records. (The KG-13’s would be kept in safes after one had been seized during the Korean War.)
J.V.C. F.O.R.C.E.
Long Island’s JVC FORCE won the acronym battle with Justified by the Virtue of Creativity For Reasons Concerning Entertainment.
“It didn’t really sound like Joe.” The HY-2 Vocoder photographed in 1964, invented at Bell Labs and deployed for secret telephony in Saigon, Paris and the State Department in Washington. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 8
.1)
The HY-2 Vocoder, photographed at the NSA Museum of Cryptology in Fort Meade, Maryland. Invented in 1961, the HY-2 was the main secure voice apparatus patched into the worldwide AUTOSEVOCOM network during the Cold War. (illustration credit 8.2)
The STEAMVALVE system had to be patched into the AUTOSEVOCOM network, which primarily used the HY-2 vocoder. Invented in 1961 by Bell Labs and Philco-Ford, the HY-2 introduced the first generation of digital vocoders, long before analogue versions began appearing in recording studios in the early Seventies, while the HY-2 itself remained stuck in Saigon. Producing an “approximation” of human speech at 2400 bps, the HY-2 doubled the capacity of World War II’s SIGSALY behemoth. But the robotness-vs-recognition issue confounded officers not accustomed to receiving orders from a machine, unable to identify the voice on the phone any better than the trees that shot at them. Displeased with the vocoder in Air Force One, Lyndon Johnson once flung his headset at an aide and yelled, “When I talk to the secretary of state, he better sound like the secretary of state!”
“They wanted [voice] recognition,” says Gentges. “It didn’t really sound like Joe. The average user knew Joe, but when he was listening to it, he didn’t think it sounded exactly like Joe. That was a problem with the HY-2.” The HY-2 inflicted further degradation on the voice in cases of rapid speech and shouting, not uncommon during the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong launched surprise attacks on major provinces in the south, putting armed American teenagers in a state of mortared panic. Users had to speak at a “moderate rate and at a moderate level” to be understood. “We were sending a representation of the voice to the far end,” said Donald Crowder, a lieutenant who serviced vocoders in South Vietnam.
Much about the AUTOSEVOCOM network is still held close. The word vocoder is rarely used in the AUTOSEVOCOM community—at least among those willing to talk—often walled up in tech shorthand and bold-faced acronyms. Though many vets are hesitant to discuss crypto-gear from a war in stubborn denial, the HY-2 saw heavy voice traffic in 1968. The Saigon terminal supported the Paris Peace Talks from 1968 to 1972, with systems linked to the palace of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, as well as Paris and the State Department. Little was accomplished over these phone lines other than deadlock and the realization that Nixon’s National Security advisor Henry Kissinger—slippery back-channeler and vocoder in his own right—had been holding covert cease-fire negotiations with the North Vietnamese Politburo. Meanwhile, Nixon was busy wiretapping the home front while the vocoder channel in the presidential limo was accidentally intercepting frequencies from the Weather Bureau.
For the most part, the tactical specifics of AUTOSEVOCOM—what was said and who said it—won’t be declassified until 2030. The HY-2 user manuals are stashed away somewhere on NSA property in Fort Meade, Maryland. The AUTOSEVOCOM manufacturing site is now a shuttered mall. “Something happened in 1972 that I can’t tell you about,” says Frank Gentges, shadowy to the point of sport. “Fifty years from now, maybe, but not now. I’m throwing an awful lot of crap at you. You’re dancing in a minefield.”
A couple of Frank Gentges’ spectrum analyzers, photographed at his Metavox laboratory in the fall of 2009. (illustration credit 8.3)
“Please listen to my limo.” The secure voice channel in Nixon’s limousine accidentally picked up frequencies from the Weather Bureau. Nixon pretty much eavesdropped on everything but his own conscience. Writing in an ITT newsletter, Nixon science advisor Ed David imagined the vocoder would “bring us closer to the robot.” (illustration credit 8.4)
ALL CLEAR
Every time a kid went to war, his mother threw out his magazines.
— Forrest J. Ackerman, as told to author, 1998
More space, Willy, more space soon!
— Wilbur Whateley of the Decaying Whateleys, The Dunwich Horror
Rik Davis has spent the afternoon blowing up trees. Deposited by helicopter, the eighteen-year-old Marine from Detroit squats in a bomb crater near Dong Ha, in the northernmost region of South Vietnam. He carries a chrome M-16, some C4 to heat his cocoa, and a leaflet picturing girls, smiles and Coca-Cola. On the flip side is a photo of a B-52 Stratofortress dropping bombs. This psy-op propaganda is intended to convince the Vietcong to defect while promising chieu hoi, “open arms.” It’s 1968. The stomach of Rik Davis is expecting grenades.
“Most people you interviewed were in the rear with the gear,” says Davis, now fifty-five, living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I was not one of those.”
When we first spoke, Davis summed up his Vietnam experience with an H.P. Lovecraft quote, shriveling his voice for the occasion. “I wonder what I’ll look like when the planet is cleared off.” The question originated with The Dunwich Horror and ended up with a private first class who refers to himself as “3070.” If the squidlocked Cthulhu has anything to say about it, Davis will look like some ancient bat-winged entity with a beard of tentacles, its voice produced by nonhuman organs with “ghastly infra-bass timbre,” a voice “unseen and foul in lonely places,” abandoned by reason and attended by a farm-clearing stench. This is how Rik Davis deals. A little bugg shogg y’heah from one who split his teenage years between riots in Detroit and getting shot at in a remote jungle on the other side of the planet.
Published in 1929, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dunwich Horror used “voices with ghastly infra-bass timbre.” Rik Davis defines Cybotron’s electro-funk classic “Clear” in terms of carpet-bombing, redaction, and Lovecraft’s Old Ones de-peopling the planet. (illustration credit 8.5)
Though Lovecraft and Vietnam share an interest in the nameless and the unspeakable, Rik Davis implicates both in “Clear,” an electro-funk classic he recorded in 1982 with Juan Atkins, a Parliament nut from Belleville, west of Detroit. Dunwich refers to a dimension of “Clear” that the record itself never wished to consider: Lovecraft’s Old Ones depopulating Earth if the Rapture didn’t beat them to it. “It may sound like pure fantasy,” says Davis. “But it’s just apocalyptic Christian doctrine.” In 1982, “Clear” was far too busy filling skate rinks, too busy melting the wheels off your shoes—too busy being proto—to worry about who left open the last gate to hell. “Clear” was a minimal exchange between two artificial voices created by “slap back delay with a comb,” one a burping silo, the other more treed in pitch, both chilly and bleak. Though “Tomorrow is a brand new day” never held such cheerless menace, the kids—the Sons of the P—danced out of their constriction.
Juan Atkins had befriended Rik Davis in 1980 while taking electronics classes at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor. They named themselves Cybotron after a particle accelerator and the type of robot that puts humans out of business. Signed to Fantasy Records, Cybotron were just two guys pushing drum machines and Korgs through a city that lived and died, and died again, by the machine—Atkins, the future godfather of Detroit techno, and Davis, his soul on Eldritch, now making Lovecraft EROS DVDs in Ann Arbor (and apparently still unbeatable at throwing darts underhanded).
The first two Cybotron singles, “Alleys of Your Mind” and “Cosmic Cars,” were released on Atkins’ label Deep Space Records. The latter had the misfortune of being delivered to New York radio stations the day “Planet Rock” broke and has been trying to avenge itself ever since, only showing its age with a double toot of car horn. “ ‘Cosmic Cars’ was the beginning of driving for me,” says Atkins’ friend Kevin Saunderson, another of the early techno DJs. Saunderson was borrowing his mom’s Seville at the time. “Cybotron was music for progressive black kids who came from the lower class but dressed like middle-class preppy kids, smoking Germ cigarettes, wearing Polo sweaters, khaki pants and penny loafers.”
Cybotron, Enter (1983, Fantasy Records). Rik Davis breaks for the Detroit public library to read Famous Monsters of Filmland. “We didn’t sound like Kraftwerk—Kraftwerk had deep pockets.” (illustration credit 8.6)
Juan Atkins remembers “Clear” as being misread as Scientology propaganda, auditing the reactive
subconscious for an L. Ron Hubbard time-share. To Rik Davis, “Clear” was face down in the mud in Vietnam. It was urban renewal, carpet-bombing and Lovecraftwerk, a secret history of destruction buried in a song that greenly believed, “Earth is ours for us to save,” though the Old Ones already claimed ownership. “Embrace the world-destroyer,” says Davis. “It’s the only way to live. Because whatever you cling to, it’ll be destroyed. The hippies perished in it. They thought it was forever.”
For Juan Atkins, “Clear” was a technocratic vision, with all the utopianism of “Planet Rock” and the spatial neuroses of “Pack Jam.” He had read Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book The Third Wave, which hailed post-industrial automation and hybrid neologisms. (Could machines replace human assembly lines so GM could chew up the highways that had already destroyed black neighborhoods?) “Clear” would end on a positive note that nobody heard: “Out with the old/ In the with new.” “They deleted it from the radio version,” says Atkins. “That was basically the concept behind the whole album. Clear out the old program. Technological revolution.”
For me, the technological revolution started in a Zenith clock radio inherited from my parents’ divorce. “Clear” was the first electro song I heard, an escape from junior high psy-ops. My mother was in the room when it happened, fooling with a dislocated window shade, the sunlight crushed by October, and Les Norman, the Night-Time Master Blaster of WPEG, on the radio. “Clear” came from nowhere, swooping from above. I didn’t know whether to nod my head, duck, or just blow up the request line. (Blowing up request lines was not easy before the invention of redial.) “That’s the idea,” says Davis. “It’s all coming down from above. ‘Clear’ is outside what exists.” What I saw outside that day was a swirl of dead leaves chasing each other in the street like children. As if something had just taken off. The song ends in a turbine swoosh, leaving you behind.
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