Trump’s Candidacy – by Vocoder

ISUFC photo

By

Gil Trythall

Whatever your politics, a Greek tragedy is unfolding in Washington D.C.. It may or may not be the equal of the doomed House of Atreus in the Iliad, but it has the potential.

I thought it would be interesting to go back to the beginning, the presidential campaign announcement of June 15, 2015, Trump Tower, New York City, and, using a vocoder, make a musical setting of the major campaign themes and promises made by Donald Trump at that time.

For the technically minded, a vocoder (voice encoder) is software that analyses one audio signal (usually speech) and encodes, impresses this information on another audio signal (usually an instrument), thus allowing the instrument to ‘talk’.

Gil Trythall

Dr. Gil Trythall, b. 1930, Knoxville, Tennessee, US, taught music at Knox College, Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University), West Virginia University, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo in Vitória, Brasil, and Brookhaven College, Dallas, Texas for more than 40 years. He is best known as the synthesist of the electronic country music albums COUNTRY MOOG and SWITCHED ON NASHVILLE. He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Northwestern and Cornell Universities. Books include Sixteenth Century Counterpoint and Eighteenth Century Counterpoint (published by McGraw-Hill, out of print) and Principles and Practice of Electronic Music (Grossett and Dunlap, out of print).