Seite - 62 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/01

62 | Florian Heesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft und ermögliche es Ihnen, Sprache, Musik und Bild durch den Äther auszusenden und zu empfangen. Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich. Deshalb hütet mich gut, mich, den Genius der Energie. This is the voice of energy. I am a giant electric generator. I provide you with light and power and the possibility to send and receive words, music and pictures via airwaves. I am your servant and your master at the same time. This is why you should care for me, me, the genius of energy. The vocoder principle in Carlos’s and Kraftwerk’s music was basically reproduced in the vocoder machines that could subsequently be purchased to make musical effects: a vocal signal is filtered and combined with another sound source – usually not a pow- er line but a musical instrument like keyboard or guitar. Thus, the voice becomes the modulator, the instrument becomes the carrier of the sound. In addition to the rather technical process of production, the vocoder affects our perception of the singing voice enormously. The “bodiless sound” that Wicke ascribes to studio-produced mu- sic since the introduction of multitrack recording in general is also a principal charac- teristic of vocoderised singing, although it can be even more explicitly bodiless, for we may hear singing instruments or voices that seem to sound from strange non-human or at least only partially human beings. Thus, recorded music with vocoderised voices points our minds to the relationship between the subject’s body and the machine, or, as Kay Dickinson states in her study on vocoders and female identity: “vocoder tracks vividly highlight the inextricable bond between subjectivity and mechanisation. They propose a dichotomy between the vocoded voice and the more ‘organic’ one.”43 When it comes to identity, the crucial question is, who uses technologies like the vocoder to modify his or her voice into a hybrid sound of body and machine? When we look critically at how voices in popular music are constructed in line with racist ste- reotypes, it is easy to observe that African American voices heard in genres like blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul are often conceived as sounding particularly natu- ral or human.44 However, a closer look at African American culture reveals that the stereotypical association with “humanity” is unfounded. As Kodwo Eshun has shown 43 Dickinson 2001, 336. 44 As Allan Moore has shown, early rock musicians, particularly in the United Kingdom, held an image of the African American blues as closely connected to a romanticised picture of “natural” African culture; see Moore 2001, 71–75.