Singing Instruments

The vocoder device (voice encoder) has a long history. Many music experts associate its prevalence with the emergence of pop music. However, there is evidence that long before this and almost sixty years before Daft Punk - in 1939, the effects of a talk box were already being used by artist Alvino Rey in his performances with an orchestra and a 'talking guitar' connected to a microphone backstage... A later example of a vocoder can be seen in another vintage video from 1962 featuring producer, head of a recording company, and musician Pete Drake performing his hit 'Forever…'