Dave Tompkins 50 Best Vocoder Records

The 50 Greatest Vocoder Songs

Young Smoke - Space Zone

Heir to Drexciya.....? This album is so so More Brilliant then the Sun material..... As well as fragmented dislocated android voices check how ("malign gremlins perverse voco-imps and the metallically dredged VaderVoder..... hyperbabble to ultraslow" - text remixed),..... rather than an eckoplex distorting space and time, space and time are dissolved and folded into one another through an erratic and dizzying disrhythmia... syncopation discombobulation. ("you can't catch the beat, the tails of sound as they turn round a corner, disappear down a corridor (...) where rhythm should be there is space, and vice versa. (...) pivots around an absent beat (...) Every track ambushes you, confound the process of pattern recognition by leaving the unexpected beat implied" K.E. - p.64)

Also-  check out psycho war - track 23 on Bangs and Works http://www.planet.mu/discography/ziq310

Timestretched Vocals

Splash - Babylon - Thanks Mark


A nice remix - If I heard that bark in a club I would have a nervous breakdown - in body and mind.



...and one of my favourite old Warp Records tracks - Chris Clark, Gob Coitus (the LP version has more..... much much more metallic grained timestretch in it - but for some reason both the Richard Fenwick and Lynn Fox videos use edited versions with a more click-hoppy choppy ending rather than the dragged out ableton death-rattle on the original - which is amazing - can't find the LP version online though)

Android Phonix

Some vocoder videos to go with the last two essays

Susan McClary, "This is not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson"

Kodwo Eshun, "Inner Spatializing the Song" and "Programming Rhythmatic Frequencies" from More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction




"Zapp is the menschmachine gone gooey (...) android doowop (...) fleshless rigidity converges with the spineless electroid of Zapp" -  K. Eshun


^^^... tagging on from Beyonce post vvv

Beyonce in pitch-shifting gender play pop glory:

Obviously DJ Screw's old "drag"-mixes of Lil-Kim is the original trad-gender sonic inversion.... (see not tonight) but the techno-phonic queering of pitch in this new track from Beyonce is a step further. A down-tuned vocal, Beyonce's rap, is transformed into a drag-rap. Another identity, and a queering of identity boundaries, is afforded by the mixing desk; Beyonce trans-phones from glam-soul serenading sequinned siren to trap-rap alter-ego.

"New Voices For The Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets An Upgrade"

Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University, has found a way to capture what she calls the "melody of the voice," and applied it to a striking new form of synthetic voice production. Patel's system works by taking samples of simple sounds produced by the individual whose voice she wants to synthesize—in her case, primarily children with severe speech disorders—sounds such as "aaahhhh," and combines these sounds with words spoken by a "healthy donor" of a similar age as the first individual. From the first set of sounds, they "can determine their pitch, the loudness, the breathiness of their voice, the changes in clarity," Patel says, and when combined with the "donor" voice, the new synthetic voice provides an uncanny approximation of a new voice for the speech impaired individual.

Read or listen to the complete story, "New Voices for the Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets and Upgrade" by Alix Spiegel here on NPR, and hear a few of Patel's synthetic voices!

Foetal Syllabic Understanding

Alfred Tomatis! Who said that:

"6. Communication is a process that begins in utero. The unborn child hears as early as the fourth month after conception. Sound actually helps grow the fetus’s brain and nervous system."

 Not so suspect after all!!!! Check out this study

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-human-brain-discriminate-syllables-months.html

Ripped straight from Neuroscience Research Techniques

A team of French researchers has discovered that the human brain is capable of distinguishing between different types of syllables as early as three months prior to full term birth.
Image: (Upper) Schematic representation of the location of the optical probe on an infant’s head relatively to anatomical landmarks. (Lower) Estimated projection of the optodes on the brain of a 30 wGA preterm infant [courtesy of Petra Huppi and Jessica Dubois]. The eight emitters (red circles) are arranged on two 1.5-cm-diameter circles centered by the two detectors (black circles), creating 10 points of measure (channels) over each hemisphere (blue circles).

Further info: http://bit.ly/XXWFwV
Journal article and image credit: Syllabic discrimination in premature human infants prior to complete formation of cortical layers, PNAS, 2013 http://bit.ly/13JtlCB
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My 4 voice/horror tropes

Finally got round to posting something about my 4th trope, a-linguistic sounds of transformation. It's all about the grain basically. The trope overview sums up the latter 3.

a-linguistic corporeal sounds of transformation

Split subject voice

Dislocated/Relocated voices

Spectral Acousmatic Voice

trope overview