Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Thu, 30 Jul 1992 18:54:53 EDT
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      Friday I'm in luft

From:         "Michael M. Masuda" <MASUDA@SJSUVM1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: vocalizer

> A vocalizer or vocoder is a complex signal processor requiring two
> sound inputs.

You shouldn't charge into the stuff about the bandpass filters before you say
what they're for. The basic idea is that the various sounds that constitute
speech (called "phonemes") sound like they do because they've been created by
an acoustical filter, i.e. your mouth. The vocoder analyzes your speech sound
and computes what parts of the basic spectrum of your voice have been filtered
out, and applies the same filtering to the musical signal that you plug into
the other input. (How it actually does it is just the reverse of that: looks
for the frequency ranges that *are* there and opens up just those filters.)
The filter settings corresponding to individual speech sounds are called
"formants," so the term "formant filter" is sometimes used to refer to the
second part of the system, which also gets used in speech synthesis devices
such as the "voder."

The Peter Frampton talk box creates more or less the same effect, but it does
the same thing backwards: the guitarist has a tiny little amp that feeds his
guitar sound into his mouth through a little tube, then he mimes the speech
with his mouth, and the acoustic filter of the tongue and palate affects the
guitar sound just as if it were the sound of his vocal chords. There was at
least one Herbie Hancock hip-hop record where he "sang" through a vocoder
connected to one of his keyboard synths, which I thought was totally cheesy
and led me to conclude that his own voice wasn't good enough.

This of course assumes that the "vocalizer" is in fact a vocoder, which is
still in doubt. Other things it might be instead include a pitch follower,
which would try to decide what note you were singing and send out either a
control voltage or a MIDI signal corresponding to that note, or one of those
instant karaoke devices that tries to filter the existing vocals out of your
favorite record by mixing the two stereo channels together out of phase.

From:         AISARMSTRONG%IST%VMI@IST.VMI.EDU
Subject:      re: Dylan

> Billy Rae has Dylan's creativitity and his talent.  All country music singers
> sing better than Dylan anyway.  Dylan sings like a broken record player.

There's a story they tell about Charles Ives. Seems he was leading a hymn sing
at a camp meeting back in Connecticut, and there was a blacksmith in town who
loved to sing at these events, very enthusiastic, but had no sense of pitch
whatsoever. People would come up to Ives, knowing he was a musician, and say
"Too bad about that blacksmith, he must sound awful to you." Ives would answer
that the passion and intensity in his voice more than made up for his lack of
pitch control, that listening to his absolute identification with these hymns
could be a transcendent experience all by itself. In Ives' own words, "You
won't get to Heaven on pretty little sounds." I submit that Bob Dylan had the
qualities of that blacksmith, if you could but hear it.

And if what you want out of vocals is the ability to hit a note on pitch, you
shouldn't be listening to country anyway, they slur their notes all over the
place. You should be listening to lieder.

From:         MCINTYRE@MSUPA.BITNET
Subject:      re: Losing My Religion

> I would add Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, and Patti Smith to the list.

Huh? What flavor of religion did Patti Smith get, and when?

Let me correct somebody's earlier post: it was Spencer who hooked up with, or
was kidnapped by, the Children of God. Green pulled a mild Syd Barrett-- quit
Fleetwood Mac, for some such reason as that fame was incompatible with what he
felt was his spiritual purpose, then did his solo album _The End of the Game_,
then toured with another band he called "Arc" (I saw them in Cambridge in 1970
or so; they had no actual material, just played a "Searching for Madge"-style
jam) and subsequently became a street person, claiming long term deleterious
effects of a bad acid trip or something. There are some Syd Barrett-type
stories they tell about Green, like the time he allegedly walked into his
song publisher's office with a shotgun and told them not to send him any
more royalty checks!

> Let me suggest that it may not be the finding religion that is the cause
> of the artistic decline.  Rather it may be that finding religion *and*
> the artistic decline are both responses to some traumatic experience;
> e.g. Patti Smith's fall off-stage and Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident.

Yeah, Zappa's work went down hill after he fell off the stage too.

Well, I'm going on vacation tomorrow, for two weeks in Indonesia listening
to serious gamelan. I'm unsubscribing for the duration, so don't get into
any interesting philosophical threads in my absence-- talk about country
music all you like :-)
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