Speech is now being remade by analyzing a talker speech for the fundamental speech information

and then using this information to remake the speech with a synthesizing device.

This is the all buzz condition and we are now remaking speech out of buzzer type energy,

both in the case of voiced sounds and unvoiced sounds.

What you're hearing is the first demonstration of a vote coder, recorded all the way back in 1939.

Invented by Bell Labs, the vocoder is a device that analyzes, compresses, and reconstructs the human voice,

originally developed to make long-distance transmissions more efficient.

At its core, the vote-quarter requires two inputs, a human voice which provides the articulation,

things like vowels and consonants, and a second signal that provides the tone.

And notably, the pitch doesn't come from the speaker's voice, but from that second signal.

So instead of a person naturally raising or lowering their voice, the machine controls the pitch externally.

This pitch can be set at almost any place by manipulation of the hand pitch dial, and now we're

going up a good deal higher, and this is the condition with the dial all the way over to the right.

Now let us put the dial all the way over to the left.

While the technology wasn't designed for musical purposes, even these early engineers understood

its potential.

In this same recording, the demonstrator sets the vocorder to harmonize with its voice and

then sings a little tune.

Good night ladies, good night ladies, good night ladies, we're going to leave you now.

Bell Labs went so far as to record a full song using the BoCorder, an Irish folk tune called Love's

Old Sweet Song. Remember, this was recorded all the way back in the 1930s.

Aside from these early demonstrations, the vote quarter wouldn't find its way into music in a meaningful way into the late 60s and early 70s.

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