Switched on Pop - Listening 2 Daft Punk: Discovery

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Daft Punk’s first album laid the groundwork for their robot personas, with four to the floor beats, programmed drum machines, and sequenced synthesizers. On their second album Discovery, Daft Punk fully lean into the artificial – singing through robotic vocoders that correspond with their now-iconic robot helmets. But in there is a paradox, explored on episode 2 of Listening to Daft Punk: the more machine the robots become, the more human the music sounds. Songs Discussed Daft Punk - One More Time Daft Punk - Teachers Daft Punk - Aerodynamic Sister Sledge - Il Macquillage Lady AC/DC - Thunderstruck Laurie Anderson - O Superman Daft Punk - Revolution 909 Kraftwerk - Autobahn Kraftwerk - The Robots Earth, Wind & Fire - Let's Groove Herbie Hancock - I Thought It Was You Zapp - More Bounce to the Ounce Stevie Wonder - 1-2-3 Sesame Street Cher - Believe Kid Rock - Only God Knows Why Barry Manilow - Who's Been Sleeping In My Bed Daft Punk - Superheroes Edwin Birdsong - Cola Bottle Baby Electric Light Orchestra - Evil Woman Daft Punk - Face to Face Daft Punk - Something About Us Daft Punk - Voyager Daft Punk - Veridis Quo Daft Punk - Superheroes Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams - LYTD (Vocoder Tests) [feat. Pharrell Williams] Daft Punk - Digital Love Daft Punk - Crescendolls Eddie Johns - More Spell On You George Duke - I Love You More Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm

songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, it's time for our second installment in our listening to Daft Punk series. Last week we explore the beginnings of Daft Punk, the French electronic music duo, famous for hiding their identities behind robotic helmets and disguised voices. In their 1997 debut album Homework, Daft Punk laid the groundwork for their developing robot personas. They made mostly four-to-the-floor house and techno music with programmed drum machines and sequence synthesizers. You may not think these sounds are controversial, but these instruments were at the heart of a debate around man versus machine. In a remix mag interview, Daft Punk connected synthesizers to concerns about automation. They said that in the late 70s, musicians

in France tried to ban the synthesizer because it was taking away jobs for musicians. That's fascinating. Sort of a neo-Luddite approach to developing technology. Yeah, Daphunk actually lean into this tug of war of man and machine when they released their 2001 album Discovery. When this record comes out, they become the robot personas, wearing helmets, having developed a robotic voice, and they explain this transformation to Rolling Stone as part of a freak accident. We had a problem with our sample.

a 999 bug on September 9th, 1999, at midnight. We were making music, and there was a big explosion. That was the last thing you remember. We woke up with many people reconstructing us. Now we express ourselves just scrolling LED lights in our heads. We are still the same. We have hearts, emotions.

We just need a bit more oil. In some kind of millennial bug on September 9th, 1999, they experience a big explosion. They're reassembled, and they are now having these scrolling LED lights in their heads. But they still have, as they say, hearts and emotions. They just need a bit more oil. I love that mythology, Charlie. It's kind of like a superhero origin story.

You know, Spider-Man gets bitten by the radioactive bug. Daph Punt encounters their own kind of software bug, which turns them into these half-man, half-machine robots. That's clever. I like that. How about this? Why don't we look deeper into this origin story of truly becoming the robots on Discovery by looking into its sounds and in particular exploring how Daft Punk found their robot voice? I think what we're going to find is that the more machine they become, the more human their music sounds. I feel like we should just hit play at the start of this album, Discovery, and see what we hear.

I mean, talk about robotic voice. I hear what sounds like a human voice, but it's been processed in some way so that it sounds like some of those characters we were listening to last week, like Rosie from the Jetsons or something. It's like human but not. Yeah, we're hearing a voice

which is processed beyond recognition. And unlike homework where we were just getting sort of short vocal fragments, one more time feels like it's a big, more of a song, makes you think, well, who are we hearing? And in track one, strangely, we're not hearing Daph Punk. We're hearing the voice of Romantony, who is one of the influences that Daphunk name on their song teachers from their last album, Homework. Daphunk asked one of their underground house music heroes to participate in this album. He obviously said yes, and they made this seemingly

endless song. He also contributes to the song Too Long. And we wonder what the heck is going on with his voice. Daft Punk use all kinds of vocal manipulation tools. And this one is actually incredibly familiar today because what they're doing is a very early experimentation in the boundaries of Autotum. Now, in November 2000, when this song came out, Autotune was largely known as the Cher effect for her famous misappropriation of a technology, which was meant to just make you sound a little bit more in tune, but she took it to the extreme on Believe from 1998. Now, it's important to know that Cher doesn't use autotune throughout the entire song.

It's more of a flavor. She, of course, has a powerful, enormous voice, and she doesn't need the auto tune. She's playing with it. Today we hear fully auto-tuned songs all the time. And when one more time was written in 1998, it may have been one of the first songs to use the auto-tune effect throughout the entirety of their performance. One more time, I'm just feeling. Celebration tonight. Celebrate.

One More Time is not the first song to use autotune throughout its entirety with this effect, because even though it was produced in 1998, the song wasn't released until later on in 2000. And unfortunately, in between that time, Kid Rock put out Only God Knows Why from 1999. And I'm very sorry for having to play Kid Rock on the show. Oh, no. Only God knows why Kid Rock. it would be a good idea to use autotune all over that track. But it was a moment in time, Charlie.

That one feels a little bit more like, well, that guy really can't sing in tune. Maybe we should just pump this effect all the way up. Whereas in the case of daft punk, Toma Bengalter said that the use of this effect treated Romantini's voice kind of like an instrument. And so from the very start, when we hear robotic voices on Discovery, They're somewhere between human, instrument, robot. At every turn, daft punk are playing with the idea of what it means to be human, what it means to be robot.

They're doing it through the voices, and they're even doing it in the sound choices that they use throughout Discovery. Daft Punk do an about face on Discovery. The sounds of homework from their last album were so critically praised, that sort of French, filter house sound, that they needed to find some new territory to discover. Now, of course, there is some nod to some of the homework filter house sound on things like One More Time that we heard on short circuit and too long. But Discovery finds Daft Punk moving away from purely synthetic electronics that are gridded, forward of the floor, house, techno grooves, and more towards human elements.

Like, even when they're using synthesizers, they're deploying them in a new way. They sound almost Baroque oftentimes. Take Voyager, for example, and it's harp-like arpeggios. Or the flute synths on very disquois, or the virtuosic arpeggios of superheroes. Yeah, this is a more kind of tender side of. synthesis than we heard in the last episode and the last album homework where we heard a lot of kind of like rough textures, textures trying to emulate a human voice. These are leaning more into sort of classic instrumental sounds. And like you said, they're very kind of lush and almost orchestral. I love how you put it

tender because they even nod to soft rock and jazz on a song like something about. us. Wow, it's like daft punk meets Kenny G. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't go full, smooth jazz. Like, there's a lot of rock and roll on here as well. Take the song Aerodynamic. For example, you get this wild guitar riff that for me is full-on ACDC Thunderstruck. I hear these rock and roll influences, not just in the guitar line. but also in their choice of drum machines. On homework, they primarily use the sounds of the 808 and the 909, analog drum machines that you would hear in house, techno, and hip-hop.

But on Discovery, they choose more rock-oriented sample-based drum machines, like the Lynn Drum, the sequential drum tracks, and Oberheim DMX. which you're more likely to hear on a Prince record. Okay, so going back to one more time and the beginning of discovery, we also hear something that's not a drum machine or a synthesizer or an auto-tune voice. It's this kind of looped sample, I'm thinking. Where does that come from?

And Howard Daft Punk incorporating samples into this other mix of son. references. Yeah, I think that's the other big change that we hear on this album. As their voices become more robotic, the instrumentation feels more human, and there's a really heavy reliance on samples from the 70s and 80s to give it that human feel. So when we're listening to one more time, we're actually hearing Eddie Johns more spell on you. What I like about the way that Daft Punk samples is they don't just take this horn line from Eddie Johns and put a beat under it and call it a song. they find new ways of contextualizing the sounds within the sample. They take just three little moments from more spell on you

and turn this sample into fragment one, two, and fragment three. Wow. That's it, just those three little moments of music. Now, there's a little formula they make. Sample two. Play it three times, then play sample one. followed by fragment three, a whole bunch of times. And the formula sounds like this.

Hearing the original source of one more time, this obscure Eddie John's song, more spell on you, it's kind of breathtaking because if you played that for me and said, what daft punk song is this? I'd be like, I don't know. There's this craft to taking a vintage track

and recomposing it in this way. It's both kind of an homage to these. classic records, and it's also completely obfuscating the original in this really interesting way. Yeah, the samples are literally played in a different order than they would have appeared on the original song. It's a sampling technique that Def Punk are borrowing from their named hero and teacher, Todd Edwards, who is also a contributor to Discovery. He sings and co-produces the song Face to Face, which is, I think, a masterclass in this micro-sampling technique.

Here they're working with at least a half-dozen different songs, little moments of time being chopped up, including some songs that are more recognizable, like Evil Woman by Electric Light Orchestra. Huh. Hearing this is like the oral equivalent of looking at a mosaic. When you zoom in, you're like, wait, how is this all related? And then when you step back, you go, oh, wow, all these samples come to make this cohesive whole.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that the samples they're taking are not just from one style or one era, but they're like, but there are all these different genres, right? Electric Light Orchestra. It's like, what is that? Like, power pop, prog rock or something. And then there are these classic soul samples. Yeah. I don't know.

They clearly don't have any feelty to like one. type of sample. I totally hear you. They are drawing from so many references, including as ridiculous as Barry Manilow. Wow, I never knew that. First of all, I love that Barry Manilow track. Who has been sleeping in my bed? And second of all, it's another instance where they just take the smallest part of that track and loop it and totally, you know, change your your perception of it in this way, which is so kind of surprising and sometimes kind of diabolical, honestly. This technique of microsampling, I think, leans into the question of human versus machine. Even though there are more human-sounding elements on this album, like samples that draw from 70s and 80s soul and R&B and soft rock

and very goofy pop, they're performed in a way that is gritted like a machine. They are quantized and sequenced. The sounds that they're choosing, yeah, they might be more rock drum like, but they're still drum machines. Every moment that you hear a sound that feels like it's leaning human, you're also pulled back into the digital. For me, one of the best examples is the song Short Circuit that as it fades out, gradually is a downsampled introducing all of this digital aliasing and distortion that sounds like a computer crashing. I think that Discovery lives in the uncanny valley, this place that feels almost human,

but uncomfortably artificial and machine-like. And I think there's no evidence more clear about the robot's personas than their voice and the sound of the vocoder. That's when we come back. Maria, you have a podcast now, and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready?

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I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. From the start of discovery, we hear the sound of a slightly inhuman, probably robotic voice. Let's hear it one more time. Sorry for the pun, Charlie. Daph Punk are famous for all of the ways in which they process voice. to sound anything but human. It's so important to the robot's identity, that in interviews, they would often throw off interviewers and tell them they used one technology when they had really

used another. It's hard to know exactly who performed what and what tools they used for each song, but Daft Punk did confirm one of their earliest uses of vocal manipulation with a tool called the Talkbox, which is this amplifier that instead of having a speaker has a little tube and you put that tube in your mouth and you can shape the words with your mouth that then get sent into a microphone. It was invented in 1939 by Alvino Ray, who used it as a gimmick to make a mechanical puppet named Stringy talk and sing the pedal seal guitar. Okay, I was not expecting that. If you had told me that was the intro to a daft punk song from the early 2000s, I would have been like,

yeah, of course it is. You know, given the kinds of samples that they're using on Discovery, I probably wouldn't have been surprised if they had used this early TalkBox stringy character as well. But definitely become, I think, more known for their use of the vocoder, which you can hear isolated on the stems of the song Get Lucky from Random Access Memories. That's like the paradigmatic daft punk sound to me. So you tell me the vocoder is what creates that sound. Yeah, and they use all different kinds of vocoders.

They like to use different tools for different songs to evoke different feelings. And we can hear it on some of my favorite songs, the songs that Daft Punk actually sing, like digital love. Okay, first of all, that's probably my favorite daft punk song. And second of all, that voice is maybe the most robotic voice that we've heard yet in their catalog. Yeah, like the title of the song says, this is digital love. The voice is digital. It sounds robotic. Daft punk are probably using the sound of a harmonizer,

which is kind of like the sonic cousin to the vocoder that we heard on Get Lucky. Today, if we imagine how a robot sounds, we're likely, thinking of the sound of a vocoder. The strange story of this instrument begins in 1928 at Bell Labs, where inventor Homer Dudley starts to figure out ways of encoding speech into electronics, and he creates this device

called the voter. Kind of like half of the vocoder. The V-O-D-E-R. The machine uses only two sounds produced electrically. One of these represents the best. The other, the vibration of the vocal cord. So the voter is this completely mechanical device

with an archaic keyboard and these foot pedals, and it takes like a year to become a voter operator where you can learn to take these components of sound and reconfigure them to actually mimic the sound of human speech. Dudley presents this voter at the 1939. World's Fair. And it sounds like this. Alan, will you have the voters say, She saw me?

She saw. Say the sentence in answer to these questions. He saw me. Whom did she say? She saw me. Hear him recite, Mary had a little lamb. Pretty astonishing to hear. And also, Mary had a little lamb.

That was the very first sentence that Thomas Edison recorded when he invented the phonograph. in the late 1800s. So I wonder if there's kind of a nod to another sort of vocal reproduction technology here. Okay, interesting. There's this historical connection between inventors, but I feel like it kind of makes this idea

of the voter feel like it's just a gimmick. We can make a machine talk if you learn how to perform with it over a year of training. But the voter is a really important part of the progression to the vocoder. a technology that Bell Labs and Homer Dudley are contracted to create with the military in the 1940s

as part of what they call Project X. Now, there's a problem that's going on. You see, in World War II, Winston Churchill and FDR are having frequent phone conversations, planning military activities. But it's found out that these conversations happening over the transatlantic cable are being intercepted by the Germans. and so there has to be some kind of way of encoding their speech so that they can talk and be absolutely sure that nobody is listening in. And so Project X is basically taking this idea of the voter,

which is a completely synthesized voice, and using some of this underlying technology to create a re-synthesized and encrypted human voice so that when Churchill and FDR are speaking, they're going to maybe sound kind of, like robots, but at least nobody's going to be listening in. And this technology gets deployed in 12 sites around the U.S. and in the U.K. so that there can be private military communications. It becomes a really important part of the war effort, even leading to devastatingly the

planning of the dropping of the atom bomb. And it was continued to be used by other presidents. JFK, for example, even used it in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wow, I was not expecting to go from digital love to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but such are the surprising paths of musical technology. Like so many technologies that get developed by the military, they eventually trickle down into the civilian world. And originally, the vocoder is not an accessible device. This is a wartime device.

It is the size of a room. It requires its own AC cooling unit. But as the technology progresses and gets smaller and smaller, Eventually, the vocoder turns into a form of musical instrument. Bob Moog builds one in 1968, and in collaboration with Wendy Carlos, they make a vocoder in 1971 performed on the soundtrack for Clockwork Orange, making an approximation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The unique qualities of this sound catch the ears of Hollywood sound designers. And just like last week when we learned about how the synthesizer was used to voice robots like R2D2, the vocoder becomes the sound of robots in film and television.

Like in Battlestar Galactica, the voice of the robot race, the Sylons, is the vocoder. Huh. Attention. Attention. His eminence, the imperious leader will be with us shortly. His ship. That is the original Battlestar Galactica, of course, from 1978. And in 1982, when Tron is made, they also use the vocoder to be the voice of a character called Bit,

which is kind of like the personification of binary code. It can only say yes and no. You mean yes. And all you can say? No. And this sci-fi robot association is not just limited to the world of Hollywood. It also extends into music. We learned last week, of course, that the group Kraftwerk used the vocoder to perform their song, The Robots.

Okay, so, yeah, those clips are like the quintessential sound of a robot voice. I mean, it's what you do even with your friends when you're imitating a robot. You get into this very mechanical sound, which I never realized until now is the vocoder, which comes to us via Hollywood, in turn via German electronic musicians and American Scent pioneers and in turn via the U.S. military industrial complex, but it's all creating this association

between robot voices and the technology of the vocoder. Okay, Nate, but there's a wrinkle here because just as everything that sounds human becomes robotic on discovery, the influences of the vocoder aren't just robotic. They're also human. The way that musicians go on to perform this instrument

are incredibly expressive. Like Herbie Hancock's 1978, I thought it was you. Or Earth, When in Fires, Let's Groove from 1981. Also from 1981, Lori Anderson's, Oh, Superman. Or maybe the most human vocoder of all, Stevie Wonder's take on Sesame Street. Big Bird has never sounded so funky. It makes me think, though, that the vocoder

really is the ultimate union of human and machine. The vocoder is taking the sound of our voice and superimposing it onto a synthesizer so that when we hear Daft Punk do the same thing, they are drawing from all of these traditions, both the military history and the sci-fi rub, allusions from film and television and craftwork, of course, but also all of this funk and soul and pop music that bring the vocoder to life. So of course, when they do the same sort of thing

to their robot voice, they're going to sing a song like digital love, a literal hybrid of code and emotions. Regardless of the technology they're using to create that sound, it evokes the sound of the vocoder and all of the history that comes along with it, they find a way to make these robots express feeling. It really makes us question, what is human when a robot can have a crush? I'm by night one. It might not be the right time. But there's something about us. I've got to do. I will share with you. Robots have feelings too. They have great feelings. I mean, At every turn, I feel like daft punk are working to deceive us about this robot persona that they have built up.

They give us a robotic voice only to imbue it with human qualities. And I feel like the hit harder, better, faster, stronger, best encapsulates all of the sounds of this album and also this robot human vocal hybrid. Yeah. Right. The song is like so many others on Discovery. based on a late 70s sample Cola Bottle Baby by Edwin Birdsong. And it's been chopped up and resequenced.

The robots enter in their vocoded voice declaring a set of robotic instructions. And then they introduce another set of instructions. only later to mash up these two sets of instructions in one musical phrase. It sounds like to me that they're displaying an act of intelligence combining their first set of instructions with their second set of instructions to create a deeper meaning. And the more they repeat the phrase as they work harder,

it's as if they gain more agency over their programming. This robotic phrase becomes more and more human sounding more like an improvised, synthesized guitar solo. When I'm listening to Discovery, I'm thinking, have these robots replaced these Frenchmen? Are they just the same but with a little bit more oil, as they say? Or are they even some kind of superhuman robot hybrid breathing new creative life into music? Daphunk will wait until their third album to give us a musical answer, are they robot or are they human on next week's episode of listening to daft punk switch on pop is produced by riana cruz engineered by brandon mcfarland edited by art chung

community management by abby bar illustrations are by iris gotlieb nishot kirwa is our executive producer and we're production of vulture and the vox media podcast network the music for the listening to daft punk mini series was composed by marcus thornt Gala. Thank you to listener Alex Hollander for playing the voice of daft punk at the start of the episode. If you enjoy Discovery, I highly recommend you check out Ben Cardu's Daft Punk's Discovery, The Future Unfurled. It is a completest book on the album about all of its history, how it was received, how it was made. Absolutely great read. And if you want to learn more about the vocoder, there's a great book by Dave Tompkins called How to Rec a Nice Beach, which is the sound of how to recognize speech as gone through a vocoder.

It sounds like how to wreck a nice beach. It's the history of the vocoder from World War II to hip hop. And finally, for the show, you can find us at Switched On Pop on social media. We're switchedonpop.com or we have some fun show merch. And of course, we'll be back again next week with our third installment and listening to Daft Punk. And until then, thanks for listening. Attention, Spotify.

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