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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

How the Vocoder Saved the World, Literally

This one in via fabio. Motherboard has a good review on Dave Tompkins' How to Wreck a Nice Beach. You can find it here.

"The brink of nuclear annihilation calls for sound advice over a secure phone line, at least one that works properly. On October 25, 1962, John F. Kennedy pushed the button and spoke on the vocoder. While his voice went to the machine, his body was at the pharmacy, infused with steroids, painkillers and anti-spasmodics. He heard a hiss of static and pushed again. At the other end, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan heard “garble,” not, “I don’t want to have an incident with a Russian ship tomorrow.” While the US Strategic Air Command was at a DEFCON 3 state of readiness—with no secure way to communicate with the ground—Kennedy’s Brahmin accent was being transformed into “Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck,” a side effect of processing the president’s vocal tract into a binary code. Talk of a “Naval interdiction” of all vessels bound for Cuba was compressed and artificially rendered at 1667 bits per second. The letter R was nowhere to be found.

Kennedy had been using the KY-9, a 500-pound 12-channel scrambler developed by Bell Labs in 1953. He often turned to the KY-9 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time when a single teletype exchange with Premier Khrushchev in Moscow could take over twelve hours between transmission..."

Click here for all posts featuring Dave Tompkins' How to Wreck a Nice Beach including video.

How to Wreck a Nice Beach on Amazon. Added to the Synth Books section as well.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

How to Wreck a Nice Beach - Book on the Vocoder

via Melville House Publishing and available on Amazon here.


"How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks

The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon

This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase "how to recognize speech"—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets.

The result is an amazing chronicle of postwar music and culture, filled with unexpected and surprising encounters. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, Solzhenitsyn, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, JFK, Eisenhower, Neil Young, Kanye West, the Cylons, Walt Disney, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, "We must go off!" And now the device is a cell phone standard, allowing your voice to sound human.

From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music's most provocative innovators."

Update: You can find an NPR segment on the vocoder and book here.

Friday, October 09, 2009

The Birotron


"Rick Wakeman of the band "Yes" invented and developed this instrument along with help from David Biro. Wakeman formed the company Birotronics, Ltd. which made just 35 Birotrons. Like the Mellotron, the Birotron "sampled" instruments and uses 8-track tapes for the various sounds. This was necessary before digital sampling became available. They were mainly used for strings, choirs, brass, and flutes; sounds not easily reproduced on the synthesizers of that era."

via 8-Track Heaven where you will find more info.

via John Van Eaton

Updates via the comments:
via Darren Landrum:
I seem to recall this one used tape loops, which contained continuous sounds. Shaping could then be added via an envelope generator. Great for sustaining sounds like strings, organ, and choir, but not so good for transient sounds like tubular bells. Of course, the Mellotron was most famous for the sustaining sounds, so maybe the Biro fellow was on to something. The only artist I can recall using the tubular bell tape for the Mellotron is Isao Tomita.

via Milo Johnson:
"The Birotron used 37 8-track tapes, one per key (with all of the attendant problems of 8-tracks) instead of strips of tape like the Mellotron and Chamberlin. Mellotron sounds last about eight seconds and then the tape has to rewind to play the note again. The Birotron used hand-crossfaded recordings to give "infinite" sustain, or at least until the 8-track clicked and changed direction. Rick was the money man and contributed some ideas for improving the instrument, but Dave had already developed it when he approached Rick for financing. It looks like fewer than 20 were ultimately produced and about half of them are accounted for. Dave didn't have one of his own instruments for many years until David Kean of Mellotron.com found and restored one and gave it to him. There is a Yahoo! Birotron Group moderated by Dave Biro, open membership so you can get the story straight from the horse's mouth."

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Synth Dreams


Dave of umop.com and The Packrat sent an email on a synth dream he had, to me and a couple of others. I replied with my own. Dave and Peter Forrest thought they were a good read so I figured I'd put up a post. Dave gave me the go ahead to start with his. If you have any similar stories, feel free to post them in the comments. I thought this particular Packrat Toon held a little bit of truth to the experience behind the dreams. BTW, title link takes you to the rest of The Packrat strip. Hmm... Now that I think of it, all the toons would make for great dreams. : ) Click the image to read it.


Before we start. Question: How many of you realized it was a dream in the middle of it and actually tried to take it back to the other side? I have.

Via Dave:
"Not for nuthin', but after I bought some office furniture at Ikea the
other day, I guess the store invaded & scrambled my thoughts, because
I dreamed I bought a little 2-osc analog synth from them.

I'd supply a picture but it was so nondescript it doesn't really
matter. It was about half a MaxiKorg with similarly colored switches;
plain black cheapo plastic body. Mixer faders all the way over on the
side, embedded in the end cheeks like an OB-Xa retrofit (for only two
VCO's?... there were so many faders...); and of course those cheeks
were Ikea's specialty "birch effect" particle board in composition.

One other detail I remember is the waveform knob was a simple knob
which went from brass (saw) to EP (electric piano [??]). When cranked
all the way left, this thing sounded fatter than the brass from ELP's
"Touch and Go" and I recall remarking to my girlfriend in the dream
(who was naked of course...TMI?) that I planned on bringing this
little $199 beauty out with me to Pong* shows as a dedicated brass
synth.

The name? "Ikeaboard" of course.

Just thought I'd share. It's weird to have dreams with this many
technical details skirting so close to the realistic."

############################################################################

Via Matrix:
"Too funny, I used to have synth dreams all the time. There was a time in
real life, where I was hitting up pawn shop after pawn shop looking for
"that deal." I had major GAS. At that time I'd have dreams about shops in
various cities with crazy analog gear I've never seen before. Bizarre
Roland/Oberheim combo analogs. The shops always seemed to have mini lofts
in the back where they stored a bunch of dusty old analogs. I have
re-occuring dreams about making rounds through pawn shops on Santa Monica
Blvd. in LA between Van Ness and Western, which I just realized there isn't
a single pawn shop in that stretch if I remember correctly, and rounds in a
downtown that's a mix between LA, Venice Beach, and Seattle. The most
memorable synth of all things was a Red SH-101 that was shiny and had curves
which slanted in by the keys. Imagine a shiny red SH-101 designed by
Ferarri and you'll get the idea.

Here's a couple of real life experiences similar to my synth dreams:

1) I used to go up to Vancouver B.C. about twice a year and run through this
routine:

1. Check-in at hotel.
2. Walk out and down one side of Granville Ave hitting every pawn shop on
the way to the liqour store (mostly avoiding eye contact with the porn shop
displays in between - Granville basically has pawn shops, porn shops, clubs,
and convenience stores with .99 pizza by the slice). And then walk back up
the other, hitting all the pawn shops on that side.
3. Buy a synth if I was lucky enough to find one (I bought my JD-800 for
$650 Canadian there)
4. Bring it and the drinks up to the hotel room, and go through my cleaning
ritual while drinking these Canadian berry flavored drinks with MuchTV
(Canadian MTV) in the background (my wife liked that show when we visited).
I'd also watch life go by out on Granville. I always got a second to third
story room with a view of the street. I'd spend about an hour clianing the
synth and then play a bit and head out for the night. Back from the night
I'd stare out the window and watch the craziness that happens when people
start leaving the clubs. The whole time I'd be glowing and thinking about
how cool it was that I actually found something. There was a Kurzweil
K2000S I was eyeing in a shop for a while, but I thought the asking price at
$800 or so Canadian was too much for it to be a deal. Visiting Granville
was my pawnshop dream in real life minus of course the mass cool gear, but I
usually found something interesting too look at if not buy. I'd always go
up for my birthday as well, so finding something on that trip was always
better.

2) I went to Maui once, and made a point to hit the pawn shops at some
point. I didn't get around to it until the last day. To my wife's
reluctance, we hit shop after shop and found nothing. We burned out and
gave up. On the way back to the hotel, my wife spots Taco Bell. We go in
and I see a pawn shop around back. I say just one more. She's says no, but
I pull the what if that's the pawn shop that has the $50 Minimoog?! She
gives in. I walk in and in the back I see what looks like either a TR-707
or 909. I figure of course it's the 707 with my luck. I get closer and
it's pretty dusty, and... It's the 909. I get that sick feeling in the
stomache, that feeling of panic like someone or something is going to go
wrong. I grab it and look at a sticker on it. It says 220, but no $. I
ask the guy working there if that's the price. Turns out he's the owner and
he says a little nervously, "oh..., we can take $30 off of that" A 909 for
$190! I say sold! But... He only takes cash. I have no cash and he is
about to close! He's in a hurry to go see some blockbuster that just came
out. The shop opens again after my plane leaves. I ask if there is an ATM
close by. There is one across a high speed highway. but he says I better
hurry because he needs to make the movie and will not wait. What do I do?
I bolt across the street. I manage to withdraw the money and run back just
as he's locking the shop. I get that sick feeling like I knew it was too
good to happen, but... he has the 909 in hand and I make my purchase. : )
Only... They didn't have any 1/4" cables for me to try it, and as he was in
a rush, I had to buy it hoping it was ok. I almost didn't get it but I
figured I could get it repaired at that price, so I'm hoping it's just not
too bad. I get back and plug it in. I hear it thumping away. Big grin.
; ) I clean it up and it's immaculate, no issues whatsoever."
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