Nod to The Legend · The inventions · Late 1930s
Homer Dudley and the Vocoder
Bell Labs engineer
Dudley built the vocoder to squeeze speech down for telephone lines, and showed off the talking Voder at the 1939 World's Fair. Musicians later used it to make synths talk.
Still heard: Robot vocals in electro, funk and pop come from a phone-company experiment.
Related legends
- Bob Moog: Synthesizer pioneer
- Ernie Seeler and the SM57/SM58: Shure engineer
- Conny Plank: Krautrock producer
- Phasing on "Itchycoo Park": George Chkiantz at Olympic Studios
- Larry Levan: Paradise Garage, New York
- John Peel: BBC Radio 1