A vocoder (name derived from voice coder, formerly also called voder) is a speech analyser and synthesizer. It was originally developed as a speech coder for telecommunications applications in the 1930s, the idea being to code speech for transmission. Its primary use in this fashion is for secure radio communication, where voice has to be digitized, encrypted and then transmitted on a narrow, voice-bandwidth channel. The vocoder has also been used extensively as an electronic musical instrument. As an instrument, it is p ...

Including:

Vocoder - How a vocoder works
Vocoder - Vocoder theory Vocoder - Early vocoders Vocoder - Linear prediction-based vocoders Vocoder - Modern vocoder implementations
Vocoder - Musical applications Vocoder - Television and film applications

Read more here: » Vocoder: Encyclopedia - Vocoder

See also:

Vocoder, Vocoder - How a vocoder works, Vocoder - Vocoder theory, Vocoder - Early vocoders, Vocoder - Linear prediction-based vocoders, Vocoder - Modern vocoder implementations, Vocoder - Musical applications, Vocoder - Television and film applications

Read more here: » Vocoder: Encyclopedia II - Vocoder - How a vocoder works

For musical applications, a source of musical sounds is used as the carrier, instead of extracting the fundamental frequency. For instance, one could use the sound of a guitar as the input to the filter bank, a technique that became popular in the 1970s. In 1970, electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog developed one of the first truly musical vocoders. A 10-band device inspired by the vocoder designs of Homer Dudley, it was originally called a spectrum encoder-decoder, and later referred to simply as a vocoder. The carr ...

See also:

Vocoder, Vocoder - How a vocoder works, Vocoder - Vocoder theory, Vocoder - Early vocoders, Vocoder - Linear prediction-based vocoders, Vocoder - Modern vocoder implementations, Vocoder - Musical applications, Vocoder - Television and film applications

Read more here: » Vocoder: Encyclopedia II - Vocoder - Musical applications

Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, often constrasted with speech. Air is expelled with the diaphragm as with ordinary breathing, and the pitch is altered with the vocal cords. With the lips closed, this is called humming. A piece of music that is sung is called a song; someone who sings is called a singer. Most singing involves shaping the voice to form words, but types of voice instrumental music which use open sounds or nonsense syllables ("vocables") also exist, for instance scat singing or yodeling. Solfege as ...

Including:

Singing - External link

Read more here: » Singing: Encyclopedia - Singing

One way of stretching the length of a signal without affecting the pitch is to build a phase vocoder after Flanagan, Golden, and Portnoff. Basic steps: compute the instantaneous frequency/amplitude relationship of the signal using the STFT, which is the discrete Fourier transform of a short, overlapping and smoothly windowed block of samples; apply some processing to the Fourier transform magnitudes and phases; and per ...

See also:

Audio timescale-pitch modification, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Resampling, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Phase vocoder, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Time domain, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Pitch scaling

Read more here: » Audio timescale-pitch modification: Encyclopedia II - Audio timescale-pitch modification - Phase vocoder

Rabiner and Schafer in 1978 put forth an alternate solution that works in the time domain: attempt to find the period (or equivalently the fundamental frequency) of a given section of the wave using some pitch detection algorithm (commonly the peak of the signal's autocorrelation, or sometimes cepstral processing), and crossfade one period into another. This is called time domain harmonic scaling or the synchronized overlap-add method and performs somewhat faster than the phase vocoder on slower machines but fails when the autocorrelation mi ...

See also:

Audio timescale-pitch modification, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Resampling, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Phase vocoder, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Time domain, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Pitch scaling

Read more here: » Audio timescale-pitch modification: Encyclopedia II - Audio timescale-pitch modification - Time domain

These techniques can also be used to scale the pitch of an audio sample while holding speed or duration constant. Note that the technique can be called pitch scaling or pitch shifting, depending on perspective. Under one definition of musical pitch, pitch is defined as the logarithm of frequency; as the musical pitch is shifted linearly (shifting every note up the scale by a perfect fifth, for instance), the frequencies of the signal are actually being scaled, because of the logarithmic relationship between ...

See also:

Audio timescale-pitch modification, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Resampling, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Phase vocoder, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Time domain, Audio timescale-pitch modification - Pitch scaling

Read more here: » Audio timescale-pitch modification: Encyclopedia II - Audio timescale-pitch modification - Pitch scaling

In electronic music, wah-wah effects are easy to produce by applying a modulation envelope to the voltage-controlled filter in an analog synthesizer. Digital synthesizers can also simulate this effect. Wah-wah effects can also be achieved by using a vocoder to modulate an instrument sound, and speaking "wah-wah" into the modulation control input of the vocoder. The vocoder then impresses the formants of the spoken sound into the musical soun ...

See also:

Wah-wah, Wah-wah - Wah-wah in trumpet and trombone playing, Wah-wah - Wah-wah in guitar playing, Wah-wah - Wah-wah in electronic music, Wah-wah - Quotation, Wah-wah - Source

Read more here: » Wah-wah: Encyclopedia II - Wah-wah - Wah-wah in electronic music

SIGSALY used a random noise mask to encrypt voice conversations which had been encoded by a vocoder. The latter was used both to minimize the amount of redundancy (which is high in voice traffic), and also to reduce the amount of information to be encrypted. The voice conversation was first encoded by the vocoder as: ten low-frequency (less than 25 Hz) signals, giving the amplitude in ten separate frequency bands, which together covered the normal range of speech (250 Hz - 2,950 Hz)); another signal indicating whether the sound is voiced or unvoiced; if voiced, a signal indicating the pitch; this a ...

See also:

SIGSALY, SIGSALY - Development, SIGSALY - Operation, SIGSALY - Usage, SIGSALY - Significance

Read more here: » SIGSALY: Encyclopedia II - SIGSALY - Operation

John Chowning of Stanford University is generally considered to be the first researcher to conceive of producing musical sounds by causing one oscillator to modulate the pitch of another. This is called FM, or frequency modulation, synthesis. Chowning's early FM experiments were done with software on a mainframe computer. Most FM synthesizers use sine-wave oscillators (called operators) which, in order for their fundamental frequency to be sufficiently stable, are normally generated digitally (several years after yamaha popularized th ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - FM synthesis

Sigh band - Current Members. Satoshi Fujinami - Guitar 1989-1992, Drums 1992-2004, Bass 2004- Shinichi Ishikawa - Guitar - 1992- Mirai Kawashima - Vocals, Bass, Synthesizers/Keyboards/Piano, Sitar, Programming, Vocoder, Sampling - 1989- Junichi Harashima - Drums 2004- Sigh band - Former Members. ...

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Sigh band, Sigh band - Statistics, Sigh band - Band Members, Sigh band - Current Members, Sigh band - Former Members, Sigh band - Other Projects, Sigh band - Discography, Sigh band - Studio Releases, Sigh band - Bootlegs, Sigh band - Demos, Sigh band - Splits, Sigh band - Compilations

Read more here: » Sigh band: Encyclopedia II - Sigh band - Band Members

When natural tonal instruments' sounds are analyzed in the frequency domain, the spectra of tonal instruments exhibit amplitude peaks at the harmonics. These harmonics' frequencies are primarily located close to the integer multiples of the tone's fundamental frequency. Percussives and rasps usually lack harmonics, and exhibit spectra that are comprised mainly of noise shaped by the resonant frequencies of the structures that produce the sounds. The resonant properties of the instruments (the spectral peaks of which are also referred to as formants) also shape the spectra of string ...

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Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - Sound basics

Subtractive synthesizers use a simple acoustic model that assumes an instrument can be approximated by a simple signal generator (producing sawtooth waves, square waves, etc...) followed by a filter which represents the frequency-dependent losses and resonances in the instrument body . For reasons of simplicity and economy, these filters are typically low-order lowpass filters. The combination of simple modulation routings (such as pulse width modulation and oscillator sync), along with the physically unrealistic lowpass filters, is responsi ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods

The Man Machine can be seen as a pillar in Kraftwerk's philosophy; the dehumanising process of humanity does not come just from plugging our brains into a machine. Postmodern society is already as dehumanised as the model, who acts mechanically in order to satisfy. Although the album can be seen as a leap away from that society into a bright future (note the major key of "Neon Lights"), the spookiness of "The Robots" reminds us that humans will not be needed in the same way in the future. Electronic Vocoder-disguised voices speak "Я твой слуга, я твой роботник" ("Ya tvoj sluga, ya tvoj ...

See also:

The Man Machine, The Man Machine - Philosophical Interpretation, The Man Machine - Controversy, The Man Machine - Track listing, The Man Machine - English release, The Man Machine - German release, The Man Machine - Equipment

Read more here: » The Man Machine: Encyclopedia II - The Man Machine - Philosophical Interpretation

There are two major kinds of synthesizers, analog and digital. There are also many different kinds of synthesis methods, each applicable to both analog and digital synthesizers. These techniques tend to be mathematically related, especially frequency modulation and phase modulation. Subtractive synthesis Additive synthesis Granular synthesis Wavetable synthesis Frequency modulation synthesis Phase distortion synthesis Physical modelling synthesis Digi ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics

All organs (including acoustic) are based on the principle of additive or Fourier synthesis: Several sine tones are mixed to form a more complex waveform. In the original Hammond organ, built in 1935, these sine waves were generated using revolving tone wheels which induced a current in an electromagnetic pick-up. For every harmonic, there had to be a separate tonewheel. In more modern electronic organs, electronic oscillators serve to produce the sine waves. Organs tend to use fairly simple "formant" filters to effect changes to the oscillator ton ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers

Early analog synthesizers were always monophonic, producing only one tone at a time. A few, such as the Moog Sonic Six, ARP Odyssey and EML 101, were capable of producing two different pitches at a time when two keys were pressed. Polyphony (multiple simultaneous tones, which enables chords), was only obtainable with electronic organ designs at first. Popular electronic keyboards combining organ circuits with synthesizer processing included the ARP Omni and Moog's Polymoog and Opus 3. By 1976, the first true music synthesizers to offe ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers

Synthesizers became easier to integrate and synchronize with other electronic instruments and controllers with the invention in 1983 of MIDI, a time-coded serial interface cable. MIDI interfaces are now almost ubiquitous on music equipment, and commonly available on personal computers (PCs). The so-called General MIDI (GM) software standard was devised in 1991 to serve as a consistent way of describing a set of over 200 tones (including percussion) available to a PC for playback of musical scores. For the first time, a given MIDI pres ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - MIDI control

One kind of synthesizer starts with a binary digital recording of an existing sound. This is called a PCM sample, and is replayed at a range of pitches. Sample playback takes the place of the oscillator found in other synthesizers. The sound is still processed with synthesizer effects such as filters, LFOs, ring modulators and the like. Most music workstations use this method of synthesis. Often, the pitch of the samle isn't changed, but it is simply played back at a higer speed. For example, in order to shift the frequency of a sound one oc ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - PCM synthesis

Physical modelling synthesis is the synthesis of sound by using a set of equations and algorithms to simulate a physical source of sound. When an initial set of parameters is run through the physical simulation, the simulated sound is generated. Although physical modelling was not a new concept in acoustics and synthesis, it wasn't until the development of the Karplus-Strong algorithm, the subsequent refinement and generalization of the algorithm into digital waveguide synthesis by Julius O. Smith III and others, and the increase in DSP power ...

See also:

Synthesizer, Synthesizer - Sound basics, Synthesizer - Overview of popular synthesis methods, Synthesizer - Synthesizer basics, Synthesizer - The start of the analog synthesizer era, Synthesizer - Homemade synthesizers, Synthesizer - Electronic organs vs. synthesizers, Synthesizer - Microprocessor controlled and polyphonic analog synthesizers, Synthesizer - MIDI control, Synthesizer - FM synthesis, Synthesizer - PCM synthesis, Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer, Synthesizer - The modern digital synthesizer, Synthesizer - Software-only synthesis, Synthesizer - Commercial synthesizer manufacturers, Synthesizer - Classic synthesizer designs, Synthesizer - Source

Read more here: » Synthesizer: Encyclopedia II - Synthesizer - The physical modelling synthesizer