Cole Cuchna

A reminder of just how deeply committed Toma and Giman were to their vision.

Building an entirely new world from scraps of their childhood.

Transforming their past into something that, still to this day, feels like the future.

What you're hearing is the first demonstration of a vocoder, 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 vocoder 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.

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

In this same recording, the demonstrator sets the vocoder to harmonize with its voice and then sings a little tune.

Bell Labs went so far as to record a full song using the vocoder, 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 vocoder wouldn't find its way into music in a meaningful way into the late 60s and early 70s.

In 1971, Wendy Carlos famously used the vocoder to voice the choir parts in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in her score for Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

In the years that followed, the Vocoder found its way into the hands of Kraftwerk, the German electronic pioneers who deliberately tied its mechanical sound to the image of a robot.

As the technology improved, becoming smaller, more affordable, and easier to use, the Vocoder began to find its way into popular music throughout the 1980s.

You can hear it on African Bambaataa's 1982 hit Planet Rock,

and on Michael Jackson's 1983 smash, PYT.

By the time Daft Punk began making music in the 90s, the vocoder's part-human, part-synthetic sound made it the perfect tool to capture the digital spirit of their robot personas.

And while the vocoder's synthetic, monotone qualities had long been associated with robots, Daft Punk pushed that relationship further than anyone before them, transforming it from a novelty effect into a philosophical exploration of humanity's evolving relationship with machines.