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3 Musical applications
For musical applications, a source of musical sounds is used as the oscillator, instead of extracting the fundamental frequency. For instance, one could use the sound of a guitar as the input to the filter bank, a technique that became popular in the 1970s.
In 1970, electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog developed one of the first truly musical vocoders. A 10-band device inspired by the vocoder designs of Homer Dudley, it was originally called a spectrum encoder-decoder, and later referred to simply as a vocoder. The carrier signal came from Carlos' Moog modular synthesizer, and the modulator from a microphone input. The output of the 10-band vocoder was fairly intelligible,
but relied on especially articulated speech.
Carlos' and Moog's vocoder was featured in several recordings, including the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, in which the vocoder sang the vocal part of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Also featured in the soundtrack was a piece called Timesteps, which featured the vocoder in two main sections. Originally, Timesteps was intended as merely an introduction to vocoders for the "timid listener", but Kubrick choose to include the piece on the soundtrack, much to the surprise of Wendy Carlos.
Electronic music instruments
Lossy compression algorithms
Speech codecs
Cryptography
