The original 1928 vocoder divided the human voice into “its constituentfrequencies, spread across ten channels, and transmitted them through band passfilters.” When received, “this information would be synthesized into anelectronic impression of human speech.” Reception was “a machine’s idea of thevoice as imagined by phonetic engineers.” It was not speech, “but a ‘spectraldescription of it.’” It may not be music, either, Tompkins ventures, but rathera sonic skeleton of it, designed by tone-deaf psychoacoustic engineers.
When musicians de-engineered the mal-engineered vocoder and turned itinto a postmodern musical instrument, things got really interesting. NeilYoung’s label, Geffen Records, sued him for using the vocoder to make his 1983album, Trans.
Shown the equipment by Kai Krause, a free-lance vocoder consultant,Young seemed disinterested in learning how to use the Sennheiser VSM-201 (thefirst “Entertainment Vocoder”). As Krause reports: “It wasn’t possible to gethim…to listen to the how-to and why… In the end, I had to give it up and letgo… About a year later, I heard Transand suddenly knew where it all had gone.” Young was sued by Geffen for “notbeing himself.” The artist used the VSM-201 to make a record that, according toYoung, was all about his desire “to sing through a voice that no one couldrecognize and it wouldn’t be judged as me.” Transis about the “suppression of emotion,” Tompkins writes. According to Mojo critic David Fricke, “You eitherloved it or hated it or ran for your life.”
Most ran for their lives, including Nils Lofgren, who was on theEuropean tour in support of Trans andwho was forced by Young to wear 5-pound ankle weights because, when he played,he was moving around too much; this tour “culminated with Neil Young trying tostrangle his bass player.” In the hands of a genius, the vocoder resulted innear madness. In the grip of a music industry divorced from meaningful creativeexpression, it would produce the pabulum of total sanity.
