Class meeting #2 – Vocal synthesis: Voder to Vocaloid – Monday 9/10

Reading:

Use the DOI links in the bibliography below to retrieve the readings using the Columbia Libraries e-resources. We will read only a small section of the Tompkins; I will scan and upload the relevant pages here.

Mills, Mara. 2012. “Media and Prosthesis: The Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 21 (1): 107–49. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.21.1.0107.
Bell, Sarah A. 2016. “The DB in the .Db: Vocaloid Software as Posthuman Instrument.” Popular Music and Society 39 (2): 222–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2015.1049041.
Tompkins, Dave. 2010. How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks. Brooklyn, NY : Chicago: Melville House ; Stop Smiling.

Courtesy links: [Tompkins, pp. 18-50]

Response:

In a short (150-200 word hard max.) response to these three readings, briefly describe a theme or topic common to all readings.

Additionally

There are thousands of tracks using speech synthesis. Recently, Porter Robinson’s album, Worlds, makes heavy use of Vocaloid software. Two contemporary examples of the vocoder include Taylor Swift, “Delicate” (at the beginning) or Zedd and Maren Morris, “The Middle” (at 0:36). In both cases, the vocoder is used to provide backing vocals supporting the lead singer (so the tracks include both the unprocessed “dry” vocals as well as the “wet” vocoded part). You should also have a look at this short excerpt from the 1939 demo of the Voder.

Class meeting #1 – Course overview/Toward the digital – Wednesday 9/5

Reading:

Sterne, Jonathan. 2016. “Analog.” In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture. Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Courtesy links: [Sterne]

Response:

Create a comment in response to this blog post introducing yourself and one thing you liked and one thing you disliked about the reading (100 words max.)