From Talk box to Vocoder

A talk box is an effects unit that allows musicians to modify the sound of a musical
instrument by shaping the frequency content of the sound and to apply speech sounds
(in the same way as singing) onto the sounds of the instrument. Typically, a talk box
directs sound from the instrument into the musician's mouth by means of a plastic tube
adjacent to a vocal microphone. The musician controls the modification of the
instrument's sound by changing the shape of the mouth, "vocalizing" the instrument's
output into a microphone.
The talk box contains a speaker attached with an airtight connection to a plastic tube.
The speaker is generally in the form of a compression driver, the sound-generating part
of a horn loudspeaker with the horn replaced by the tube connection.
The box has connectors for the connection to the speaker output of an instrument
amplifier and a connection to a normal instrument speaker. A foot-operated switch on
the box directs the sound either to the talk box speaker or to the normal speaker. The
switch is usually a push-on/push-off type. The other end of the tube is taped to the side
of a microphone, extending enough to direct the reproduced sound in or near the
performer's mouth.
When activated, the sound from the amplifier is reproduced by the speaker in the talk
box and directed through the tube into the performer's mouth. The shape of the mouth
filters the sound, with the modified sound being picked up by the microphone. The shape
of the mouth changes the harmonic content of the sound in the same way it affects the
harmonic content generated by the vocal folds when speaking.
The performer can vary the shape of the mouth and position of the tongue, changing the
sound of the instrument being reproduced by the talk box speaker. The performer can
mouth words, with the resulting effect sounding as though the instrument is speaking.
This "shaped" sound exits the performer's mouth, and when it enters a microphone, an
instrument/voice hybrid is heard.
The sound can be that of any musical instrument, but the effect is most commonly
associated with the guitar. The rich harmonics of an electric guitar are shaped by the
mouth, producing a sound very similar to voice, effectively allowing the guitar to appear
to "speak".

The effect produced by talk boxes and vocoders are often confused by
listeners. However, they have radically different mechanisms for achieving the effect.
Talk boxes send the carrier signal into the singer's mouth, where it is then modulated by
the singer themselves. On the other hand, vocoders process both the carrier and the
modulator signal integrally, producing the output as a separate electric signal. They are
also more common in different genres: a talk box is often found in rock music due to its
typical pairing with a guitar, whereas vocoders are almost always paired with
synthesizers, and as such, are ubiquitous in electronic music.
A vocoder is a means of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice
signal for audio data compression, voice encryption or voice transformation.
The vocoder was invented in 1938 by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs as a means of
synthesizing human speech.[1] This work was developed into the channel
vocoder which was used as a voice codec for telecommunications for speech coding to
conserve bandwidth in transmission.
By encrypting the control signals, voice transmission can be secured against
interception. Its primary use in this fashion is for secure radio communication. The
advantage of this method of encryption is that none of the original signal is sent, only
envelopes of the bandpass filters. The receiving unit needs to be set up in the same filter
configuration to re-synthesize a version of the original signal spectrum.
The human voice consists of sounds generated by the opening and closing of
the glottis by the vocal cords, which produces a periodic waveform with
many harmonics. This basic sound is then filtered by the nose and throat (a
complicated resonant piping system) to produce differences in harmonic content
(formants) in a controlled way, creating the wide variety of sounds used in speech. There
is another set of sounds, known as the unvoiced and plosive sounds, which are created
or modified by the mouth in different fashions.
The vocoder examines speech by measuring how its spectral characteristics change
over time. This results in a series of signals representing these frequencies at any
particular time as the user speaks. In simple terms, the signal is split into a number of
frequency bands (the larger this number, the more accurate the analysis) and the level
of signal present at each frequency band gives the instantaneous representation of the
spectral energy content. To recreate speech, the vocoder simply reverses the process,
processing a broadband noise source by passing it through a stage that filters the
frequency content based on the originally recorded series of numbers.
Information about the instantaneous frequency of the original voice signal (as distinct
from its spectral characteristic) is discarded; it was not important to preserve this for the
vocoder's original use as an encryption aid. It is this dehumanizing aspect of the
vocoding process that has made it useful in creating special voice effects in popular
music and audio entertainment.
Analog vocoders typically analyze an incoming signal by splitting the signal into multiple
tuned frequency bands or ranges. To reconstruct the signal, a carrier signal is sent
through a series of these tuned bandpass filters. In the example of a typical robot voice
the carrier is noise or a sawtooth waveform. There are usually between 8 and 20 bands.
In 1970, Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog built another musical vocoder, a ten-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 carrier signal
came from a Moog modular synthesizer, and the modulator from a microphone input.
The output of the ten-band vocoder was fairly intelligible but relied on specially
articulated speech.
The Electric Light Orchestra was among the first to use the vocoder in a commercial
context, it was used extensively on the hits "Sweet Talkin' Woman" and "Mr. Blue Sky".
There are also some artists who have made vocoders an essential part of their music,
overall or during an extended phase. Examples include the
German synthpop group Kraftwerk, Stevie Wonder ("Send One Your Love", "A Seed's a
Star") and jazz/fusion keyboardist Herbie Hancock during his late 1970s period. The
chorus and bridge of Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)". features a
vocoder.