Robotic voice effects became a recurring element in popular music starting in the second half of the twentieth century. Several methods of producing variations on this effect have arisen.
Vocoder
The vocoder was originally designed to aid in the transmission of voices over telephony systems. In musical applications the original sounds, either from vocals or from 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 which then trigger noise generators. The sounds generated are mixed back with some of the original sound and this gives 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 1970Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog built another musical vocoder, a 10-band device inspired by the vocoder designs of Homer Dudley which was later referred to simply as a vocoder. Carlos and Moog's vocoder was featured in several recordings, including the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick'sA 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 ; The Alan Parsons Project's track "The Raven" ; Electric Light Orchestra on "Mr. Blue Sky" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman" 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 in a more comprehensive manner in specific works, such as Jean Michel Jarre on Zoolook, Mike Oldfield on QE2 and Five Miles Out. There are also some artists who 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 bandCynic.
Other examples
Though the vocoder is by far the best-known, the following other pieces of music technology are often confused with it: ;Sonovox ;Talk box ;Pitch correction ;Linear prediction coding ;Ring modulator ;Speech synthesis ;Comb filter
