Incognito, the very secret life of the vocoder

By B.

In the eighties Phil Collins was cool and his reflective hit “In The Air” captivated us.  In that song Collins used a vocoder to robotically disguise his voice.  This effect, combined with a MTV clip featuring his disembodied head singing like Kryten from the void, created emotional distance between Collins and the song’s core message of retribution.

“…So you can wipe off that grin/ I know where you've been/ It's all been a pack of lies/ And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord/ Well, I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord” (Collins xx)

Daft Punk built a career around concealing their identity under Cybermen masks so it is not surprising that they have enthusiastically embraced this effect in songs such as Robot Rock.  Even the first musical use of vocoder by Bob Moog and Wendy Carlos for the soundtrack of  “The Clockwork Orange” was about someone concealing their true nature.  

The movie features it in a variation of Beethoven’s Ninth for the scene “You are invited”.  In this scene the character Alex takes a break from his usual hobbies of thuggery and rape and actually charms two girls he meets in a record store into bed with him.  He even sheds his usual garb of white long-johns, codpiece and false eyelash in favour of a  smart lace fronted neo-romantic top-coat.

In fact the VOice enCODER was not even invented for music.  In World War II it was used to scramble trans-Atlantic conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt (Apple)

So the vocoder is tool of choice for artists what either want to hide who they are or disguise what they are saying.