The musical idea behind the wah-wah pedal, which changes the tone of an electric guitar’s signal, is as old as the trumpet and trombone mutes it was meant to emulate. Despite the proliferation of the different but like-minded Auto-Tune effect heard on Cher’s “Believe” or T-Pain’s hits, groups like Daft Punk have kept the vocoder sound alive well into the 21st century. By the ’80s, Phil Collins and Neil Young were getting in on the act. Not to be confused with the similar but distinct “talk box,” which applies speech sounds to an instrument rather than a synth, the vocoder would feature in the next decade on music by acts like Kraftwerk, Electric Light Orchestra, Giorgio Moroder, and Pink Floyd. Carlos’ use of a Beethoven vocoder in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, accompanying scenes of record-shopping, a fast-paced orgy, and cruelty, introduced the vocoder’s musical capabilities to a wide audience. Wendy Carlos, an early proponent of the Moog synthesizer with her 1968 LP Switched-On Bach, later worked with Moog on a prototype vocoder. As early as 1967, the vocoder could be heard in song on Alvin Lucier’s “ North American Time Capsule,” though it’s doubtful how many listeners would have discovered it. The vocoder-essentially, a synthesizer that analyzes speech and electronically recreates it-has a long and fascinating history that dates back to Bell Labs in 1928 and runs through World War II. Eventually, though, new technological advances set the stage for CDs, pocket-sized digital music players, and even entire genres, like hip-hop and techno, which would reverberate well into the 21st century. The first half of the decade could be seen as an extension of the ’60s, as previously invented gadgets-multi-track and cassette tapes, synths and vocoders, car stereos and wah-wah pedals-continued to be honed. If it exists today, there’s a good chance it could be considered ’70s retro. But in many ways, it was the 1970s marked the dawn of the modern era in music technology, applying and refining the developments of earlier decades while also laying the foundations of the techniques and styles that would follow. From the first primitive percussion instruments, catgut strings, and animal horns, to Thomas Edison’s phonograph and the jukebox, how we listen and create has evolved with the tools of the times.īy the 1950s and 1960s, the technological conditions were ripe for the birth of popular music as it’s often idealized today, with AM and FM radio going mainstream, vinyl records supplanting the earlier shellac format, and multi-track recording developments clearing the way for late-’60s studio experimentation. The history of music is inseparable from the history of technology.
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