If you've listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you've probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research ...

Stop Smiling Books/ Melville House; 335 pp. The room contains two turntables and a microphone. Hulking consoles line the walls, covered in dials and gauges and blinking lights, like the bridge of ...

Vocoders can sound very stylised, but Orange IV covers all the bases that you’ll ever likely need, in a neat and stylish plugin. Significant latency makes real-time playing a challenge. Some glitches ...

Softube has introduced Vocoder, a new plugin that delivers exactly what its name implies. Offering the look and feel of a vintage vocoder, this features a six-voice carrier synth with four selectable ...

The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine. sort of alienated from your body. It ...

A scientific tool for those lacking a voice, a means of encrypting voices during World War II, and a way to drop the funk, the vocoder has had many exhale its praises, from General Dwight D.

The vocoder—code name Special Customer, the Green Hornet, Project X-61753, X-Ray, and SIGSALY—started distorting human speech in earnest during World War II, in response to the excellence of German ...

It is hard to remember that scant decades ago, electronic magazines — the pre-Internet equivalent of blogs — featured lots of audio circuits based on analog processing. Music synthesizers were popular ...

French electronics company Arturia, which is mostly known for its electronic music equipment, has announced that its MicroFreak has been updated with a vocoder function and a new white makeover. A ...

When Arturia announced the MicroFreak in January of 2019 I said “there's nothing stopping Arturia from adding more oscillators down the road through firmware updates.” And the company has not ...

Sometimes a melody just captures your ear in a way that renders you powerless to resist. I've written before about "For You," the R&B-ish ballad recorded by both Stefon Harris and Robert Glasper last ...

Arturia's MiniFreak is one of our favourite synths released in the past few years, a versatile and affordable hybrid analogue/digital poly that gained even more creative firepower following a ...