Page - 64 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

64 | Florian Heesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 as the alleged realm of white Euro-American men. As Weheliye shows, argumentation is necessary to reveal the hegemonic nature and the implied oversimplification of that dichotomy. Listening to the music can help deconstruct such stereotypes because it leads to audible encounters with unexpected identities, for instance African American and female singers. Indeed, the vocoder (and also the talk box) shares a gender bias with many other technologies in Euro-American culture. At least in the first period of its musical history, the vocoder was used more often by men than by women, although not exclusively, as the early example of Wendy Carlos indicates. Laurie Anderson’s track “O Super- man”, which originated in avant-garde performance but reached number two in the UK single charts in 1981, stages a gender-critical reflection of android identity via the vocoder. In Susan McClary’s seminal study on gender in music, Anderson serves as a crucial example for how delineations of gender are challenged: as McClary points out, “When Anderson involves herself with electronics, she confuses ... habits of thought grounded in gender difference.”50 As critical as Anderson’s example was, it has long been a rather singular deviation from the stereotypically masculine association with the vocoder technology. That stereotype was fractured more extensively in the late 1990s. Kay Dickinson dates this shift to 1998, the year after Cher had her late number one hit with “Believe”: since then, the vocoder effect has been adapted by a range of other female artists and has been heard many times in chart hits.51 Again, as in the case of Troutman’s contribution to the vocoder’s popularity in black music, the technical contribution will likely be debated. Cher recorded her vo- cals for “Believe” without a vocoder, although she had reportedly brought up the idea of applying a telephone-like sound to her voice. The instrument-like steps in cer- tain passages of her singing are a product of an effect applied to the record track sub- sequently by sound engineer Mark Taylor. During an interview in 1999 for Sound on Sound, a journal for recording technology, Taylor stated that he had intended to apply a vocoder effect, but when the then classical vocoder Korg VC 10 did not produce the desired effect, a Digitech Talker vocoder pedal was used.52 Consequently, Taylor talks about the passages that include the stepping effect as the “vocoded sections”. The technical protest against that account would suggest that this effect was generated not with a vocoder but with Auto-tune, a software programme for pitch correction in song recording that was published in 1997. According to the online re-edition of the Sound on Sound article, it seems established as fact that “the (now) highly rec- ognisable tonal mangling” in “Believe” was produced with Auto-tune.53 It would be 50 McClary 2002, 138. McClary’s detailed analysis of “O Superman” focuses on the lyrics and harmonic structure rather than on the use of the vocoder. For a recent discussion of the reception of the piece in scholarship and further analytical insights, see Eckenroth 2014, 21–24. 51 Dickinson 2001. 52 Sillitoe/ Bell 1999. Dickinson 2001 quotes indirectly from that article, too, but without reference. 53 Sillitoe/ Bell 1999, “historical footnote” by the editors.