Page - 61 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

Voicing the Technological Body | 61www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 As we have seen, recorded popular song can be heard as representing hybrid singer identities in general, but certain technologies of sound processing enforce the hybridity more blatantly than others. Machines like the vocoder or the talk box basi- cally function by combining vocal and instrumental sounds. These technologies make the mixture of voice and machine so obviously audible that it would hardly be possi- ble to miss the hybridising effect. I will therefore discuss the category of hybridity by focusing on these special technologies. Although they were originally developed as hardware machines, certain software was generated around 2000 that can produce similar sound effects. In terms of technology, I will therefore also take some software into consideration. The vocoder, its name a contraction of “voice coder”, was invented by Homer W. Dudley (1896–1987) and developed in the Bell Labs, the research section of the U.S. telephone company AT&T, during the 1930s.40 Its original purpose was to reduce the bandwidth of telephone signals by filtering the relatively slow frequencies of verbal articulation out of the transmitted vocal signal and synthesising a new vocal signal from the reduced frequency band and an unvoiced signal at the receiving end. In the Second World War und during the Cold War, vocoder technology was used for trans- mitting coded voice messages overseas. Since its first public demonstrations in 1936, the vocoder has been used with reference to music, by transforming singing voices. Pioneer of electronic music Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) introduced vocoderised singing to a larger public in her soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s movie A Clockwork Orange (1972). Like Carlos, the German band Kraftwerk, known as pioneering for its consid- ered use of electronics in popular music, employed the vocoder, a machine with no original musical-related purpose, years before vocoders were commercially produced by music technology companies. The members of Kraftwerk dealt with early research on vocoder technology in the electronic music studios in Cologne, in particular the ac- tivities of radio engineer and information theorist Werner Meyer-Eppler (1913–1960), who had played Dudley’s early vocoder demonstrations for a German public. Accord- ing to Tompkins, Dudley “had a power line humming as ‘the voice of electricity,’ light- ing houses and claiming to be power itself”,41 an idea Kraftwerk included in a track on their album Radio-Aktivität (Radio-Activity, 1975). “Die Stimme der Energie” (“The Voice of Energy”) largely consists of the following text, spoken by a voice that is mod- ulated into a monotonous “robot voice” by a vocoder:42 Hier spricht die Stimme der Energie. Ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer Generator. 40 Cf. Tompkins 2011. To Tompkins the art of storytelling seems to be as important as delivering infor- mation, and more important than giving precise indications of his sources as measured by academic norms. Nevertheless, his book contains reliable information, heavily relevant to the history of the vocoder. 41 Tompkins 2011, 48. 42 Kraftwerk, “Die Stimme der Energie”, in Radio-Aktivität (Klingklang 1975, CD-reissue EMI).