Whether in Kraftwerk or countless dancefloor productions, robotic vocoder voices in music were the symbol of an electronic future in the 1970s. Vocoder technology was already being used to encrypt messages during the Second World War. John Kelly and Carol Lochbaum further developed it in 1961 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. There, the two researchers programmed the room-sized IBM 704 computer so that it could sing. Together with computer music pioneer Max Mathews, they adapted the 1892 love song Daisy Bell – demonstrating the potential of the still-young digital technology.
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