How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop—The Machine Speaks
McGill University (Canada)
Never mind the robots: what’s more human than wanting to be something else, altogether?—Dave Tompkins
Never mind the robots. Electronic music has always entertained the trajectory of becoming someone—or something—slightly if not entirely other. When the Jonzun Crew performed “Pack Jam” live in 1983, they took the stage in a strange blend of interstellar outerwear and 18th century clothing modelled from the French aristocracy. Who were these Afrofuturists aliens? The Jonzun Crew’s blend of hip-hop and electro announced a unique, offworld status to black electronic music: we are not from this planet! With electronic sound ideas seem to fly at different speeds; we all dream of other planets and speaking in alien tongues. Thus it should come as no surprise that if there is a voicing to the intergalactic tendencies in electronic music—the sci-fi sounds of sonic fiction—it is thoroughly alien. The device to achieve this is known, of course, as the vocoder.
In order to write this review, I put on a greatest hits compilation of Zapp & Roger’s early ’80s electro-funk, followed by The Rammellzee’s 2004 album of duck-intoned and raspy Panzerist rap. First the sexy, silky tones of the vocoder lulled me into the ever-so-slightly alien funk of Zapp and Roger. I was on an easy-lounge spaceship leading me into deep space... inside all was warm and fuzz, shag carpet and slo-motion gravity. As Rammellzee came on, I was thrown into a different universe entirely; the vocoder was now an interface device communicating the hidden mathematics of slanguage. ‘Zee’s voice intoned growls and wheezes through alien harmonics as the vocoder became more or less menacing in the vocal chords of the Garbage God.
For researchers in EDMC, the vocoder is likely more known for its use in the earliest recordings of everything from electro to hip-hop, from Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” through Afrika Bambaata’s Planet Rock, Cybotron’s Enter through The Jonzun Crew’s Pack Jam. Roger Troutman. Scorpio. Laurie Anderson. Can. The vocoder has a storied history in the history of EDMC; it is the alien-enabling device, one of the few direct means of altering the human signature in sound to speak in alien-tongues.
Dave Tompkins provides an evocative history of the vocoder in How to Wreck a Nice Beach, digging deep into the archives of the vocoder’s buried past, unearthing rare stories of its invention, its origins as a secret scrambling device for Allied communication during World War II, and its creative misuse by legions of electronic musicians worldwide. Written in a provocative style that makes use of the vocoder’s infamous ability to blur signifiers into sonic scrambles and strange sibilances, Tompkins’ writing seeks to perform, in a way, the weirdness of the content it explores. As he recounts the strange history of the vocoder, Tompkins demonstrates an uncanny ability to cobble together seemingly incongruous observations into bite-sized slices that are as absurd as they are penetrating. Or as he puts it: “One man’s rubbish is another man’s theory” (271).
Thus the title How To Wreck a Nice Beach is a vocoded mishearing of How to Recognize Speech. Academic readers seeking a closely footnoted, dry and logical text take note: though Tompkins’ volume contains many closely researched sources that tell the story of the vocoder’s use and origin, it steams along without a scholarly apparatus. It is writ like a letter to a long lost robot lover: somewhat dense, crowded with conceptual metaphor, and enraptured with the rhyme and rhythm of its text. This makes sense, and I couldn’t ask for more; there are enough dry tomes out there. Like Kodwo Eshun, Tompkins demonstrates that a hybridity of research, critical thought and immersive approach, impecabbly researched, can always teach a thing or 2 to academia when it comes to communicating its content through style. Metaphor is not superfluous here, but the outcome of a text vocoded. This is candy for the ears. When Tompkins described the painstaking effort Afrika Bambaataa went through when to vocode “uh huh” in Planet Rock, I came to realise that nothing passes by his ears—this is a writer who is a raptured listener.
Besides its use in music, How to Wreck a Nice Beach discusses in some detail its invention. Like many such technologies exappropriated by a myriad of performers during the 20th century to form the strange culture of electronic music, the vocoder’s history is military in origin. Invented by Bell Labs, it served as an encoding device for phonecalls between none other than the likes of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The vocoder is basically a bandwidth compressor and a scrambler. It slices the source into specific frequencies which can then be cut-up and rearranged across the scale. When combined with a randomized channel of noise, the result is a transmission that sounds a little like background hiss over the radio. What is thoroughly intriguing about the vocoder’s earliest incarnations—along with its massive, vacuum-tubed room size—is that two turntables were used to synchronize the scramble platters. One-off vinyl records were recorded with the signals necessary for encoding/decoding the encrypted signal. These records, by the way, were made by the Muzak company (72). With the calls connected through the vocoder, say from Washington to London, the turntables on either end would have to be matched in perfect sync for the conversation to properly decode. In short, both beatmatching and the alien vocoder were invented to get the Allies talking. Who knew?
During the War the Russians were working on a vocoder as well. Well-known dissident author Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, a zek or prisoner in a sharashka—a gulag for inmates with some technical skills—worked on the design of a Soviet vocoder in the Moscow suburbs. His experience is documented in his book The First Circle (1968), which Tompkins weaves into the Cold War narrative of the vocoder’s use as an encryption/compression device for communications. What is interesting is how Tompkins unfolds the fate of the vocoder during its early days. In 1939, vocoder inventor Homer Dudley (of Bell Labs) offered the vocoder to MGM Studios in Hollywood as a “scientific aid to movie stars,” a kind of autofix for bad voicing, possibly for use in overdubbing (49). A large-scale, art-deco Voder was presented to the public at The World’s Fair the same year, as a marvel of modern telecommunications; the public could have their voice mangled in front of the crowd. The War, however, intervened, and the vocoder went more-or-less underground until its resurrection in public life by—who else—the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which managed to get its hand on the costly EMS 5000 Vocoder in 1976 (90). Still in use as a mobile communications encryptor during the Vietnam War—in a convenient suitcase size—the vocoder found its way into the hands of musicians, who immediately began to misuse it as a strange kind of signal processor. Though analogue vocoders had been built after the War by the likes of Siemens, it was Robert Moog (and Wendy Carlos) who built one of the first solid-state vocoders in 1970. Carlos went on to score Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; from then on the vocoder popped up everywhere in prog rock: Tomita, Styx, Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons Project and ELO. But for Tompkins, the paradigm shift is Michael Jonzun, Afrofuturist hip-hop and electro innovator, who used a Roland SVC-350 to create an entirely vocoded identity (111). It didn’t take long for it to fall into the hands of the likes of Kraftwerk, Can and Afrika Bambaata.
Along the way, Tompkins clears up several misconceptions concerning what is and is not a vocoder. Roger & Zapp, for example, used a Talkbox, as did Peter Frampton (notably on his best-selling Frampton Comes Alive (1976)). Likewise, T-Pain does not use a vocoder but rather more-or-less “is” (at least sonically) the software program Auto-Tune. In fact, Tompkins’ reflections on the confusing technico-ontology of being an application make a fascinating postscript to the book:
As the voice of pop-radio, Auto-Tune is there for the confusing identity siege that is junior high. Faheem Rasheed Najm is T-Pain. T-Pain is Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune is a vocoder. (T-Pain said so.) I am T-Pain is an App. You are T-Pain. T-Pain is a brand. No sooner did Jay-Z call for Auto-Tune’s head after seeing Wendy’s use it to sell a Frosty, than Apple made the I am T-Pain app available for $2.99. As demonstrated on the Champion DJ track, “Baako,” babies can now be Auto-Tuned before reaching intelligibility (303).
Marshal McLuhan would be impressed—which is actually not a bad point of comparison for this book, save that Tompkins, on many occasions, does it better. There are no embarrassing “tribal man” motifs and Tompkins’ in-depth knowledge of his subject allows him to forge connections between technics and concept at a level perhaps best compared to a funky mix of Friedrich Kittler and Kodwo Eshun. Indeed, this is how I tend to read Tompkins when, on the same page as his reflections on Auto-Tune, he writes: “Robotic is the world in which everyone sings perfectly without even knowing it” (303). The consequences of always-already technico-ontology could not have been stated more succinctly. The question is: has it already happened?
Perhaps. The vocoder finally saw the widespread adoption of its intended use as a bandwidth compressor when the world began gossiping on digital cellphones. Yes, the PCM band (Pulse Code Modulation) is a vocoder. The voice is scrambled down into harmonic particles and reassembled, which is why we all sound just a bit like robots on the mobile. I am unclear if this remains the case once we all switch over to data networks, but this shows again how the vocoder has become oddly ubiquitous in modern society’s use of audio communications, both for alien effect and as its means of cost-effective efficiency, which is where the whole story began.
Bambaata, Afrika and the Soulsonic Force. 1982. Planet Rock. Tommy Boy (US): TB 823. <http://www.discogs.com/Afrika-Bambaataa-Soulsonic-Force-Planet-Rock/master/19152>.
Cybotron. 1983. Enter. Fantasy (US): F-9625. <http://www.discogs.com/Cybotron-Enter/master/133>.
Frampton, Peter. 1976. Frampton Comes Alive! A&M (US): SP-3703. <http://www.discogs.com/Peter-Frampton-Frampton-Comes-Alive/release/401512.
Jonzun Crew, The. 1982. Pack Jam (Look out for the OVC). Tommy Boy (US): TB 826. <http://www.discogs.com/Jonzun-Crew-Pack-Jam-Look-Out-For-The-OVC/master/128146>.
Rammellzee, The. 2004. The Bi-Conicals of The Rammellzee. Gomma (Germany): Gomma044. <http://www.discogs.com/Rammellzee-Bi-Conicals-Of-The-Rammellzee/master/80142>.
Roger and Zapp. 1996. The Compilation—Greatest Hits II and More. Reprise (US): 9 46243-2. <http://www.discogs.com/Roger-Zapp-The-Compilation-Greatest-Hits-II-And-More/release/2761961>.