Great examples can be heard on The Robots and Autobahn. Coupled with the emerging stature of German sonic pioneers Kraftwerk, who harnessed the Sennheiser VSM 201 – a vocoderr made in 1977 – on some of their early records. This was a major revelation for mainstream listeners. She was fascinated by the concept of a ‘singing synthesiser’ and used it liberally throughout the synthesised tracks on the record. Among these is the prevalence of the vocoder. You may be aware of the numerous milestones that Wendy Carlos’s 1971 A Clockwork Orange soundtrack represented. It was used by many European experimental composers throughout the 50s and 60s including Mauricio Kagel, Bengt Hambreus and Milko Kelemen.
There was also a white noise generator and something called a Hohnerola – a hybrid, electronically-amplified reed instrument similar to the Multimonica. Technically speaking, the synth was made up of four punch paper vari-speed rolls, which controlled the timbre, envelope, pitch and volume of 20 oscillators. The machine was equipped with an in-built vocoder and was capable of spanning seven octaves.
Nothing quite like this had been seen before. The vocoder evolved further in 1959 when German engineers Helmut Klein and W.Schaaf created the Siemens Synthesiser at the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music.
