Robotic voice effects became a recurring element in popular music in the second half of the twentieth century. Several methods of producing variations on this effect have arisen.
Vocoder
The vocoder was initially designed to aid in transmitting voices over telephony systems. In musical applications, the original sounds, either from vocals or other sources such as instruments, are used and fed into a system of filters and noise generators. The input is fed through band-pass filters to separate the tonal characteristics, triggering noise generators. The sounds generated are mixed back with some of the original sound, giving the effect. Vocoders have been used in an analog form from as early as 1959 at Siemens Studio for Electronic Music but were made more famous after Robert Moog developed one of the first solid-state musical vocoders. In 1970, Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog built another musical vocoder, a 10-band device inspired by Homer Dudley's vocoder designs. It was later referred to simply as a vocoder. Carlos and Moog's vocoder was featured in several recordings, including the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for the vocal part of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" and a piece called "Timesteps." In 1974 Isao Tomita used a Moog vocoder on a classical music album, Snowflakes are Dancing, which became a worldwide success. Since then they have been widely used by artists such as: Kraftwerk's album Autobahn (1974); The Alan Parsons Project's track "The Raven" (Tales of Mystery and Imagination album 1976); Electric Light Orchestra on "Mr. Blue Sky" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman" (Out of the Blue album 1977) using EMS Vocoder 2000's. Other examples include Pink Floyd's album Animals, where the band put the sound of a barking dog through the device, and the Styx song "Mr. Roboto". Vocoders have appeared on pop recordings from time to time ever since, most often simply as a special effect rather than a featured aspect of the work. Many experimental electronic artists of the new-age music genre often utilize the vocoder more comprehensively in specific works, such as Jean Michel Jarre on Zoolook (1984), Mike Oldfield on QE2 (1980) and Five Miles Out (1982). Some artists have made vocoders an essential part of their music, overall or during an extended phase, such as the German synthpop group Kraftwerk, or the jazz-infused metal band Cynic.
Other examples Though the vocoder is by far the best-known, the following other pieces of music technology are often confused with it:
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