1939, New York World’s Fair. Bell Labs demonstrates the Voder, Homer Dudley’s innovative invention.
Dudley worked on something called Vocoder, which was generally designed to allow for the transfer of more phone calls over the copper lines (and also to encrypt them if desired). But while working, it occurred to him that one could take the upper half (the decoder) of his idea, and connect to it a manual source and thus produce a synthetic sound.
The device itself (as was customary at the time, with a female operator) was extremely complicated to operate and required months of training to reach the level demonstrated here. There were different combinations of pressing the filters (and more special buttons for certain consonants) and finally a pedal that is placed under the table and allows you to change the pitch to end a sentence in a question or even sing songs.
It took another twenty years for Werner Meyer-Eppler, a German scientist, to compile a synthesizer to replace the carrier wave of the human voice with a musical sound, and another ten years passed before the legendary Bob Moog built his first Vocoder in 1968, and then another ten years until Kraftwerk used Vocoder to sing the classic chorus “We are the robots”.
