Swing Low, Sweet Vocoder

In today's O'Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. "It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had," Jochen told me.

Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I've embedded it here for convenience. Even in cruddy YouTube quality, the performance shines.

Notice how Lewis plays pitch sweeps with the instrument's D-Beam infrared controller about two minutes in and again at the end. But what really impressed me was another type of gestural control. As Peter Drescher said in our last Digital Media Insider podcast, vocoders offer an exceptionally expressive interface to technology:

I just love the whole concept of using the formants of my voice to control a synthesized waveform. Sound designers are always complaining about the clumsiness of digital audio interfaces, and with good reason. I have never used a program that gives me the kind of emotional control over a sound that musical instruments do. But the vocoder lets me control a sound with by far the most expressive instrument of all.

Jochen has several other YouTube music links in the article; I'm heading over to explore them right now.