Pleasure Principled

Revealingly Articulate Idol Worship

With most situations in life, there are seemingly painless routes that lead to great rewards but come hand-in-hand with a catch. In the first-person shooter Doom, it’s the BFG - its powerful plasma blast has a massive damage radius but if you end up within it, you end up frying yourself. In import tuner-based arcade racing games, it’s the Nissan Skyline - a powerful 4WD machine, but without the proper breaking and accelerating techniques you end up driving into walls. In Texas Hold ‘em, it’s pocket aces - it’s a good hand to bet big with but I’ve seen it fail more than succeed (of course that’s dependent on the community cards, but I digress). As a “career”, it’s crime - it pays well but you usually end up in jail or dead. In the case of the music industry, the vocoder seems to be the easy way out of actually having to be a good vocalist and still be able to sell. Turn on the radio these days and you’ll probably bump into a song that uses it, but in the technopop world it’s hard to find a song without it. It is this effect that serves as technopop vocalists’ greatest weapon and also their biggest crutch when improperly used. It’s easy to apply, hard to master, but when used appropriately, it should enhance the musical experience instead of take away from it.

Technically, a vocoder requires two sources of audio to operate - the modulator (the voice) and carrier (the synthesizer). Both sources are fed into either a hardware or software vocoder and it spits out the vocal with the characteristics of the synthesized sound, including pitch. For more information, read this article on the Fruity Vocoder used in FLStudio or watch this tutorial from warbeats.com on how to use the Fruity Vocoder in FLStudio. After a few hours of tinkering, I couldn’t achieve the technopop vocalist sound. Apparently, the sound of the carrier used makes a world of difference. I realized that the quality of the carrier make the largest impact on how intelligible the modulator is when fed through the vocoder. I used the 3xOsc synthesizer which is a highly customizable, 3-oscillator, subtractive synthesizer, capable of generating a countless amount of sounds. Trying to come up with a sound to carry my voice was quite the challenge.

Mastering the vocoder effect is no easy feat. Even when it comes to the professionals, vocoder abuse happens often enough that regardless of when producers use it properly, their tracks still receives the same scrutiny as tracks that don’t. A recent and obvious case of vocoder abuse is from the group portable with their “hajimesasenai” single. With the way their vocalists sound with the vocoder, you’d think that they had only one. I could give them the benefit of the doubt and think that maybe their vocalists just have similar vocal qualities, but THAT similar? I don’t know. It could just be the audio quality itself preventing me from differentiating from each girl. It’s not that their vocal quality is particularly bad but its nothing too memorable since there’s nothing that separates each girl’s vocals. Another example would be cosmeticROBOT’s “merushimerodi” where initially I found the difference in voices to be minimal. I can pick out specific traits, but without being able to see or know anything beyond that, even the video doesn’t help with properly identifying them. The few videos they have of themselves up on YouTube are horribly lit and focus more on the dance and stage, ignoring their faces unlike most technopop lives and PVs. Also, their dancing is nowhere near as intricate as Perfume’s moves.

Back when my fascination with Perfume started and before I saw and pictures or videos of the trio, without a vocoder, I could only pick out two vocalists. Then again, the only song I had was “sweet donuts” and Kashi’s voice was the only one I could consistently pick out while picking out A-chan and Nocchi was 50/50. As time progressed, I could start hearing the subtle differences with the vocoder on top of Perfume’s vocals and as their voices began to mature, their individual styles really started to shine through. Kashi managed to stay cute and nasal regardless of being vocoder or not. A-chan also managed to stay cute but maintained her richer quality; she remains the best vocalist from the trio but loses a lot of it through vocoding. Nocchi kept her unique airy quality that compliments and rounds out the trio’s vocals perfectly, both with and without vocoder. These traits became more obvious with their later tracks where Nakata started cutting down on vocoder usage.

Aside from causing rich vocals to lose personality, the carrier also controls the pitch of the modulator and “fixes” any tonal irregularities. In my experience, you could just talk then play a melody using the carrier and it would sound like singing. This allows one to question the vocal integrity of technopop vocalists. There are two sliders on the Fruity Vocoder panel that allows modulator and carrier pass-through. Having both at 0 and the vocoder effect at the default 80%, my voice was barely intelligible at best. This leads me to believe that, with Perfume, Nakata allows a lot of modulator pass-through and we do hear a lot of Perfume’s real voices, especially in the more vocally developed Perfume tracks. What he does with the vocoder is enhance performance by adding little digital flavour. Nakata ranges with Toshiko in capsule with some songs with a lot of vocoder (”Eternity”, “Get Down”, “Starry Sky”) and some songs with minimal to no vocoder (”glider”, “dreamin dreamin”, “jelly”). With MEG, Nakata tends to keep most of the vocals intact with a lot of small touches during long holds and when something fun happens on the instrumental side of the track. This is, of course, not including MEG’s club-style songs (”MODEL”, “MAKE LOVE”, “SUPERSONIC”). With Suzuki Ami, he gives her the Perfume treatment but with a totally different instrumental arrangement and more club-like technopop styling. Even though you can hear the digitizing effects of the vocoder, you can still hear a lot of her natural voice. It complements the instrumental and the genre styling like PB&J. Outside of Nakata’s clients, Aira Mitsuki should get a mention. Her producers makes heavy use of the vocoder similarly to Suzuki Ami, enhancing the vocals more than damanging.

One thing to remember while reading this is that the vocoder is just an effect, a filter - like reverb, delay, overdrive, equalizing, and the like. Imagine a metal guitarist playing clean. Would his solo be as epic? Not so much. It’s not like adding effects to metal guitars take away from the experience either; if anything, they add nothing but awesome. Another thing to think about is that the human voice is just an instrument. After watching the video posted in this contemode LJ Community post, we learn that Nakata believes that modifying regular instruments, like the piano, bass, and drums, through effects and filters has been well explored and that voices are still an unknown area. The main difference between a human voice and an instrument is that we are able to say words while manipulating tones, allowing a story or idea to be told while singing. Words have always been the most direct form of communication and lyrics are the fastest way to get your feelings across through music. For those who lack abstract imagination, trying to feel a song through music may be awkward and just plain hard to do; Lord knows I don’t understand a thing that happens in ballet. Nakata himself says that we’re still ways away from getting a voice to emote. Putting aside the pitch control aspect of vocoding, would adding effect to a voice be any different than adding effects to a guitar? Would using a whammy-bar be considered cheating? I believe that no is the answer to both questions.

So can the vocoder be a bad thing? Yes and no; it’s dependent on how it’s used. When used properly, it adds another layer of complexity to the already artistically rich world of music. When abused, it does nothing but hurt the genre, and more importantly, the industry. What can we do to stop hurting the industry? Not support bad music. I guess this has already started since we haven’t heard from portable since late last year. cosmeticROBOT’s blog has seen recent updates. I haven’t been keeping up with MEG and capsule but both are still active and recovering from single and album releases. Perfume’s upcoming single “One Room Disco” is available for preorder along with their “BUDOUKaaaaaaaaaaN!!!!!” LIVE DVD and it doesn’t seem like they’ll be losing steam anytime soon.