Deirdre Loughridge

Category: Music and Technology

  • Voices of the Dead: From Edison to Tupac via Sonovox

    …whoever has spoken or whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust. The possibility is simply startling…Speech has become, as it were, immortal.

    “A Wonderful Invention – Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition from Automatic Records,” Scientific American (Nov 17, 1877)

    At the end of the nineteenth century, the invention of sound recording suggested a new era in which the voice would not die with the body but would rather be stored up, preserved, so that future generations could hear the dead speak. As one phonograph enthusiast remarked in 1896, ”death has lost some of its sting since we are able to forever retain the voices of the dead.”

    But what if one wanted to hear a voice of the dead say something it had never uttered in life? That was the challenge faced by the creators of the Tupac Shakur “hologram” for the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Though the resurrection of Tupac (who died in 1996) proved a media sensation, reporting focused almost exclusively on the visual illusion and its mechanics – including a special fascination with the fact that the “hologram” wasn’t really a hologram but rather constituted a 21st-century version of a 19th-century optical illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost.

    Tupac’s vocal performance, no less than his dance moves, required technology wizardry with a curious genealogy. The sound engineer responsible, Claudio Cueni, discussed the process of creating Tupac’s vocal performance on Pensado’s Place (a show for folks in the audio biz). While the visual team plumbed footage and medical records to recreate Tupac’s appearance in meticulous detail, Cueni combed recordings: no vocal double was be used – everything had to be Tupac’s own voice. The word “Coachella” – crucial to establishing the virtual Tupac’s presence at the festival and apparent interaction with the audience – proved particularly difficult, as Tupac never said the word in life (the Coachella music festival started in 1999, three years after Tupac’s death). But by joining the word “coach” to a mixture of sound-alikes for “ella,” and by time-stretching, auto-tuning, and altering vowel sounds with the audio plug-in Talkbox, Cueni was able to assemble the phrase “What the f*** is up Coachella?” from Tupac’s recorded voice.

    It is with Talkbox that the genealogy of Tupac’s resurrected voice gets interesting. Since 2008, the plug-in has come with the digital audio workstation Pro Tools. In its Audio Plug-Ins Guide, Pro Tools explains that the purpose of Talkbox is “to add voice-like resonances to audio signals.” The website Pro Tools Production adds that this plug-in (like many plug-ins) digitally models a previous analog device:

    The hardware equivalent is a stomp-box with a speaker connected to a plastic tube which ends up in the musician’s mouth. The user changes the shape of his/her mouth to filter the sound which is then picked up by a vocal mic.

    The hardware predecessor to Talkbox was brought to prominence in the 1970s by Peter Frampton, who used it on such hits as “Show Me the Way” (from the album titled – get this – Frampton Comes Alive!).

    Before there was the Talk Box, however, there was the Sonovox. The idea behind these two technologies was similar: both used the shape of the mouth to modify the frequency content of a reproduced sound. With the Sonovox, instead of putting one’s mouth on a tube that transmitted the sound to be modified, one pressed two loudspeakers against one’s throat. In both cases, the user silently mouths words while the transmitted sound does the job of the larynx, or voice box. (“The Talk Box is an extra larynx,” Frampton has said, “you shut of yours and get piped in larynx. It could be a guitar, it could be a synthesizer – anything that could be amplified and come out of the speaker and be bypassed and put through the tube.”) Lucille Ball demonstrated the newly invented Sonovox in a newsreel of 1939, in which the sound she modifies comes from a recording of a train (in 1941, the Sonovox was used to impart speech to a whistle and steam for the voice of the train in Disney’s Dumbo):

    Like the illusion of Pepper’s Ghost, the Sonovox found an early application in conjuring the dead. In the 1940 film You’ll Find Out starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, the Sonovox plays an important role in the performance of seances. The first seance scene features three visitors from the beyond, the first speaking through a trumpet, the second drawing a low, growling voice from unseen drums, and the third a wispy voice in the wind:

    In this second seance scene, the trick behind these voices is discovered:

    These inhuman voices of the dead are a far cry from the faithful recreation of Tupac’s stage voice sought and achieved by Cueni (and it’s worth noting here the convenient fact that Tupac’s stage voice was always already mediated by microphones and loudspeakers, allowing Cueni to mask imperfections by adding reverb and delay without these effects seeming unnatural). Analogously, a main appeal of Pepper’s Ghost was that the seemingly three-dimensional figure could pass through objects and people; holographic Tupac, by contrast, remained distant from his on-stage company – never revealing the insubstantiality of his form, and encouraging us to perceive him as a living presence.

    John Durham Peters has observed that “two ruling ambitions in modern technology appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead” (Speaking into the Air, 161). While the conjuring of the dead seemed to fade in importance in the twentieth century, the ability now not just to replay but also to reanimate the archive of a life lived – to generate new performances from it – has renewed the ambition. With today’s technology, death is no obstacle to the comeback.

    If conjuring the dead remains a ruling ambition, however, it is also significant how much that ambition has changed in the last century+. Early phonograph users imagined that the vibrations of a voice, preserved in tinfoil or wax, carried a person’s presence. Something of this remains in the insistence that the holographic Tupac use Tupac’s own voice. Yet, in using Talkbox, Cueni treated Tupac’s recorded voice as an audio signal that needed to be artificially imbued with “voice-like resonance.” Like a train whistle or guitar, Tupac’s voice (cut up and reassembled syllable by syllable) became the raw material to which sonic markers of sentience and life were added. The remarkable result of such technological gymnastics was the convincing illusion of Tupac’s resurrection. Whereas yesterday’s technologies shadowed forth a second, ghostly realm, today’s thoroughly blur the boundaries between presence and absence, animate and inanimate, life and death.

    In You’ll Find Out, the sonovox pivots from this “yesterday” to “today.” In the final scene, Mr. Kayser – the one who discovered the trick behind the seance – presents a more wholesome, musical application for the Sonovox. Just before the start of this clip Mr. Kayser declares, “it gave me a whole new idea for a band number. We’re going to let our instruments speak for themselves!”:

  • Music, Technology, Theory Timeline (c.1650-1850)

    I’ve been experimenting with using Prezi to map out developments in music and (primarily visual) technology. Though it’s a bit clunky to use in this way, I like the ability to include images and move between distant and close views, and I’m finding it useful for organizing information chronologically and conceptually.

    Go to timeline on Prezi

  • A Dynamic Medium for Creative Thought: Beethoven’s Erard Piano

    For most of his early career, Beethoven played on German and Viennese pianos.  With the light action, clear attack, and rapid decay of these instruments, he composed themes such as this, from the concluding movement of Op. 49, No. 1:

    Op. 49, No. 1 – Rondo: Allegro; Zvi Meniker playing a reproduction of an Anton Walter piano, c. 1790

    Beethoven, Op. 49, No. 1, third movement (first edition)

    In 1803, Beethoven received a new, French piano from the maker Sébastian Érard.  This piano responded differently to his touch, used a foot pedal rather than knee lever to lift the dampers, and produced different sonorities.  It was – as Tilman Skowroneck has discussed – a new tool with which to conceive musical ideas.  With the less clear attack and longer decay of its tones, Beethoven explored new possibilities and abandoned old ones.  One result was themes such as this, from the last movement of Op. 53 (the Waldstein Sonata):

    Sonata No. 21, Op. 53 – Rondo: Allegretto moderato – Prestissimo, Bart van Oort playing a c. 1815 Salvatore Lagrassa piano

    Beethoven, Op. 53, third movement (first edition)

    The long slurs, the slow pace of harmonic change, the rippling accompaniment in the right hand while the left hand alternates between resounding bass notes and treble-register theme, the bell-like quality of this theme  – all are products of Beethoven’s interaction with his new Érard piano, the medium of his creative thought.

    In “Personal Dynamic Media” (1977), Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg heralded a new “dynamic medium for creative thought” in the form of the Dynabook, a predecessor to the notebook computer.

    Kay and Goldberg described the Dynabook as an active medium (or really, “metamedium” that can be all other media), which they saw as basically unprecedented.  “For most of recorded history,” they wrote, “the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even ‘motion’ pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer’s wishes.”

    Yet the piano, and indeed all musical instruments, are responsive media.  Some are more responsive than others – in 1796, Beethoven was dissatisfied with a Streicher-made piano because it “deprived him of the freedom to create my own tone.”   But all musical instruments respond to the “queries and experiments” (to use Kay and Goldberg’s language) of their users.

    Why did Kay and Goldberg exclude musical instruments from the prehistory of the Dynabook?  Not out of neglect.  As Kay and Goldberg state, “one of the metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly and consistently to its owner’s wishes.”  Here, the reason for the exclusion becomes clear: Kay and Goldberg conceived musical instruments as interfaces, not as media.

    Recently, Kay has suggested that musical instruments and computers belong to the same category. In a 2003 interview, he remarked, “the computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.” This sounds like a statement from a culture in which musical instruments are primarily vehicles for already composed music.  It is as if music exists prior to instruments, simply waiting to be accessed.  That musical instruments and computers are now the same for Kay may reflect the failure of one the dreams behind the Dynabook: the dream that everyone would become computer “literate.”  Discussing the thinking behind the programming language he developed for the Dynabook, Kay explained, “the ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools generated by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.”  The early environments developed using Kay’s language emphasized the “writing” side of literacy: they were for such activities as painting, animation, and composing.  On the Dynabook, kids wouldn’t learn how to play a musical instrument – they would create their own musical instruments, and write music with them.  With the Dynabook, Kay and Goldberg hoped, “acts of composition and self-evaluation could be learned without having to wait for technical skill in playing.”

    Music on the Dynabook prototype.  On the right, “a musical instrument is created.”


    But lets look at how Kay and Goldberg conceptualized media in 1977: “external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows.”  That, to me, sounds like a good description of media.  And it sounds like an excellent description of Beethoven’s Érard piano.  Which should teach us that no technology can be a short-cut to our ideas; but any can be a medium for creative thought.

  • Transmitting Knowledge: Two Views

    Theodor H. Nelson, “No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks” (1970)

    We can now build computer-based presentational wonderlands, where a student (or other user) may browse and ramble through a vast variety of writings, pictures and apparitions in magical space, as well as rich data structures and facilities for twiddling them.

    “Face to Face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution” (2003)

    It’s like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.

    On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don’t need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don’t have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.

    The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas….

    So computers are actually irrelevant at this level of discussion—they are just musical instruments. The real question is this: What is the prospect of turning every elementary school teacher in America into a musician? That’s what we’re talking about here. Afterward we can worry about the instruments.