The Noise Hits All at Once: A Trans History of the Votrax SC-01 Voice Synthesis Chip
Whit Pow / New York University

Figure 1: An image of the first page of the Votrax SC-01 Phoneme Speech Synthesizer Data Sheet, published in 1980.

PRINT #2: “I CAN TALK”
PRINT #2: “HELLO “; NAME$

From “MAKING YOUR PROGRAM TALK,” The Votrax Personal Speech System Operator’s Manual, 9.

Jamie Faye Fenton’s 1981 GORF arcade cabinet was one of the first to use the Votrax SC-01 voice synthesis chip. This chip was notable for its lilting, computerized voice, and was used in arcade cabinets including Wizard of Wor (1981) and Q*bert (1982).[¹] The sound of the Votrax’s voice has been resonating through my research for years, bringing together histories of glitch art,[²] transgender (trans) history, computer history, disability, and the computerized voice: what it means for a computerized sound to become legible as a voice; what it means for a voice to become a computerized sound; and what it means for trans people to break, use, and modulate their own bodies, and the sounds of their own vocal cords, through computers. 

Figure 2: Taken from Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky, and Dick Ainsworth’s 1978 video art piece, Digital TV Dinner, which is cited as the first piece of video glitch art made using a digital source (which in this case was the Bally Astrocade Home Computer and video game console, of which Fenton was the software lead)

The Votrax SC-01 chip, created by the Detroit-based company Votrax International, Inc.[³] has ties to histories of disability and assistive readers as well. The chip was initially created for phoneme-based (that is, sound-based vs. word-based) speech, which opened the pathway for its extensive use in text-to-speech applications. The SC-01 chip was used in the first iterations of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first assistive device to use optical character recognition (OCR) to translate text to speech, which “soon became the most widespread method used by blind people to read”—a history that has been written about extensively by my friend and colleague Mara Mills.[⁴] Throughout the 1980s, the Votrax and other voice synthesis chips like it appeared in game consoles, pinball machines, arcade cabinets, and home computing systems, including in iterations of the Votalker cards and cartridges (which used the Votrax SC-02 chip)—hardware add-ons which could be installed in commonly used computers including the IBM PC, the Apple II, and the Commodore 64, to lend these computers a voice.[⁵]

I have mulled over an archival video of Fenton, dated as recorded in 1981, since I first digitized it in 2020 at the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[⁶] The video begins with the SMTPE video color bars—static columns of white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, blue, black—and then the screen abruptly cuts to the image of Fenton’s hand at the controls of the prototype arcade cabinet for GORF, an arcade game she programmed that was released by Bally/Midway in 1981.

As the image enters the screen, noise hits all at once—an overwhelming wall of layers of human and synthetic sound that becomes more distinguishable as your ear acclimates to the noise and begins to differentiate it. A computer-generated sound, shifting from high to low, resonating with the dropping of a bomb from an enemy spaceship on the arcade screen; the loud, jagged, crackling, and resonating boom of a computerized explosion; a human voice (Phil Morton’s) cheering “Wooooo!” as he films the scene at a distance; occasional bursts of explanatory shouting from Fenton as she plays GORF: “I’m intimidated by this video equipment!” 

Figure 3: A screenshot, courtesy of the author and the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, of Fenton’s hand at the controls of the prototype arcade cabinet for GORF, an arcade game she programmed that was released by Bally/Midway in 1981.

Layered in the middle of this soundscape is a robotic, tinny fluted sound that emerges, first punctuating the noise at intervals, modulating upward and downward in pitch. It becomes clearer, over the course of the video, that this is a voice, too, and it is speaking. The voice starts off unintelligible over the booming crashes of explosions, but then becomes more and more legible. Into the cavernous-sounding room, at a brief happenstance moment of silence, the voice says, clearly, “PREPARE YOURSELF FOR ANNIHILATION, SPACE CAPTAIN.” The sound is tinny and pauses at strange, computerized intervals, sounding more like the fluctuations of a theremin than a human voice.[⁷]

What happens when an electronic sound becomes legible as a voice? When a voice is transmuted into an electronic sound? Perhaps the answer is that these categories of being are not actually as far apart as we may think. Westley Montgomery puts it movingly, writing that “The voice is not only the result of mechanical or technological processes but is itself a technology that structures perception.”[⁸]

Fenton’s connection to the mediation of the voice through computers appears not just through her work on GORF, but also in her writing on trans voice, where she documents how she has used computer audio recording software in order to do pitch and frequency analysis of her own voice, using the computer as a tool to mediating the structures of perception of her own body.[⁹] In my own work on histories of trans life and computation, I look at how trans people have critiqued the mediation of the body through systems and institutional structures, imagining the body as a kind of media.[¹⁰]

Trans people have a long history of critiquing the computer, too: Computers have been designed, carefully and meticulously, to perform the ideological mediating work of the state. They have been built to easily hierarchize, sort, categorize, and differentiate data, information, and thus people, and present this as if it is normalized, as if it is the air we breathe, instead of the emplacement of artificial, and highly racialized, systems of structuring human life. If computers are built upon institutional ideologies, then the long history of trans people questioning the sovereignty of the computer through our breaking and mis-use of computational structures also performs a breaking and questioning of the institutional structures that bind us.[¹¹]

Figure 4: A screenshot of the official website of the Trans Games Zine (TGZ), just released in 2025, found at https://transgameszine.org/. TGZ is an ACLS-grant-funded project helmed by Ari Gass and Teddy Pozo.

The history of trans life and electronic sound is often told through Wendy Carlos, a Grammy Award-winning artist, musician, and composer and the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, who worked extensively with vocal synthesis technologies including the vocoder, a genre of voice synthesis technology not unlike the Votrax.[¹²] There is also extensive work written about the constitutive spaces of trans life and electronic music, including Mackenzie Wark’s book Raving; Westley Montgomery’s “Becoming Spectral,” Che Gossett’s conversation with DJ and artist Juliana Huxtable, published in Trap Door, titled “Existing in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans Visibility”; work-in-progress by Keaton Ireland on transsonicality; and even work by Wark reflecting on Huxtable in “Reality Cabaret,” among many others. This work examines the intertwined connections between trans bodies and computer-generated and electronic sound, examining the technics of bodily mediation not only through the way computerized sounds become human and back again, but the way electronic music itself creates trans lacunae, or gaps, spaces in which trans life can flourish—a resonance that pierces the movement of bodies in, as, toward, and among one another in trans nightlife scenes.

Montgomery writes that trans hyper-pop artists “embrace the inherent mediation of the voice in its perception through the embrace of technology as just one element in a chain of sonic prostheses that includes muscle, bone, membrane, air, water vapor, and capital itself.”[¹³] In this passage, Montgomery offers a way of seeing the interconnectedness of the body and its mediations and prostheses across media, technology, and trans life. We exist alongside and within computers and vocal synthesis technologies, just as air and figments of water vapor exist in our lungs;[¹⁴] the membranes exist within us that serve as the translucent barriers between organs and cells; the muscles that pull on our vocal chords, that strain to adjust the pitch of our voices, the same way that chips like the Votrax SC-01 have pitch settings to modulate the high and low pitch of sound.  

Figure 5: Screenshot of the schematics of the Votrax SC-01 chip, taken from page 2 of the Votrax SC-01 Phoneme Speech Synthesizer Data Sheet, published in 1980.

Our bodies are mediated, sitting closer to the limits of what is often defined as human, and what is not. I think constantly about what it means for trans life to consist of a long, embodied awareness of media—of mediation. We have always been aware of the mediation of our bodies, artificially fragmented through the kaleidoscopic vision of institutions, which has always sought to know, document, name and identify every facet and refraction of trans life in neat categories, tables, rows, columns, diagnoses. Our bodies exceed the limits of all of this, like sound resonating through our bones, our flesh, our voice. 

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Image Credits:

• 1. An image of the first page of the Votrax SC-01 Phoneme Speech Synthesizer Data Sheet, published in 1980.
• 2. Screenshot from Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky, and Dick Ainsworth’s 1978 video art piece, Digital TV Dinner, which is cited as the first piece of video glitch art made using a digital source (which in this case was the Bally Astrocade Home Computer and video game console, of which Fenton was the software lead). (author’s screen grab)
• 3. Fenton’s hand at the controls of the prototype arcade cabinet for GORF, an arcade game she programmed that was released by Bally/Midway in 1981. (screen grab courtesy of the author and the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive)
• 4. A screenshot of the official website of the Trans Games Zine (TGZ), just released in 2025. TGZ is an ACLS-grant-funded project helmed by Ari Gass and Teddy Pozo, and the author is privileged to be a part of the project as a co-investigator. The Trans Games Zine project centers trans game developers, artists, and thinkers and work that is being done today by trans people using software, games, and technology to subvert, question, and re-imagine the potential uses of technology for trans life and futurity. The beautiful website design is credit of Soft Chaos, a trans-led website and game development team. (author’s screen grab)
• 5. Screenshot of the schematics of the Votrax SC-01 chip, taken from page 2 of the Votrax SC-01 Phoneme Speech Synthesizer Data Sheet, published in 1980.

References:

1.  Wizard of Wor was produced by Dave Nutting Associates, which is the same company that produced Jamie’s game, GORF, and other Midway games. [↩]
2.  Notably, Jamie Faye Fenton was also one of the first people to create digital video glitch art using the Bally Astrocade home computer and video game console with Digital TV Dinner (1979), a glitch art piece made with Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth. See my article, “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors,” for more on this trans history of glitch: https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/article/7/1/197/115939/A-Trans-Historiography-of-Glitches-and-Errors . [↩]
3.  Kristen Gallerneaux has written about the Michigan-based history of Votrax in her essay, “Hello My Name is Votrax” published in her book, High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter. A version of the chapter is also available through the Kresge Arts in Detroit website, where she received a 2019 Kresge Artist Fellowship: https://www.kresgeartsindetroit.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Hello-My-Name-is-Votrax.pdf [↩]
4.   Mara Mills has extensively worked on reading machines like the Kurzweil Reading Machine in her own research and writing. This quote is taken from an interview she did for an NYU publication, titled “Beyond Braille: A History of Reading by Ear.”  https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2015/january/mara-mills-blind-reading.html [↩]
5.  This history of Votrax and the Votalker and its use in these computers, is documented and laid out in Paul Elliman’s “DETROIT AS REFRAIN,” published in The Serving Library, which can also be found here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/586428/08438d074ba96ebbf77071c6e4d414e2.pdf?1460064806 [↩]
6.   I am very much indebted to jonCates, James Connolly, and the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for this opportunity—and especially to jon for his support of my research on the Bally Astrocade, glitch art, and Jamie Faye Fenton. [↩]
7.   The Votrax’s voice, interestingly enough, does not exist in all iterations of GORF. The voice so specific to its hardware and is unable to be ported to other version of the game on consoles like the Commodore 64 without a specific chip, and the voice is also difficult to emulate in video game emulators. The only certainty of getting the voice working is in an original copy of the arcade cabinet from 1981. [↩]
8.  Westley Montgomery, “Becoming Spectral: Phantasmagorias of Late Capitalism and Trans Desubjectivity in Hyper-Pop,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2024), 379-380. [↩]
9.   Fenton, too, outside and a part of her glitch artwork, has worked for a long time as a trans advocate through her work operating TGForum, one of the first spaces for trans people online—a history that is also chronicled through Avery Dame-Griff’s book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet, which can be found here: https://nyupress.org/9781479818310/the-two-revolutions/ [↩]
10.  Sandy Stone in her 1987 essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto,” writes that “Bodies are screens on which we see projected the momentary settlements that emerge from ongoing struggles over beliefs and practices within academic and medical communities.” The trans body as a screen—as a medium on which cultural, historical, institutional, and disciplinary systems are projected—presents the trans body through a history of media, and mediation. This essay can be found here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-abstract/10/2%20(29)/150/31158/The-Empire-Strikes-Back-A-Posttranssexual?redirectedFrom=fulltext [↩]
11.   This work is being done extensively at the linkages between trans life and software programming, video game design, and electronic art. I’d like to mention here new work that has been organized by Ari Gass and Teddy Pozo through The Trans Games Zine Project, funded by an ACLS Digital Seed Grant, which can be found at https://transgameszine.org/. I’m privileged to be a part of this group of trans artists, organizers, designs, and thinkers including Ari, Teddy, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, D. Squinkifer, Jess Marcotte, PS Berge, Madison Schmalzer, Geneva Hayward, Ryan Rose Acae, Hibby Thach, Amanda Phillips, Zac Millman, and others. This project involves each of us designing and releasing games, essays, and other trans-related media. I have a game, LUNGS, which will be released on this website later this year. [↩]
12.  Carlos, as far as I know, did not work with the Votrax SC-01, though it’s well documented in interviews that she has worked extensively with vocoders since at least the 1960s. In an interview with CMJ New Music Monthly, she says, “I got a chance to try [a vocoder] at the NY World’s Fair of 1964-65, at the Bell Labs Pavillion. I was hooked!” (https://www.wendycarlos.com/vocoders.html). There is an extensive intersection between trans history, electronic music history, disability, and histories of the telephone through Bell Labs as well. See, for instance Mara Mills’s work on Bell Labs in work including “The Audiovisual Telephone: A Brief History” (https://files.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/32980158.pdf) and others. [↩]
13. Montgomery, “Becoming Spectral,” 374. [↩]
14.   I have written about my own body as media in my own work and research, which includes “Glitch, Body, Anti-Body,” an essay published in Outland Art Magazine for a special issue on glitch edited by glitch artist Rosa Menkman that discusses my own relationship between embodiment, trans life, glitch art, and the computer screen. This can be found and read at https://outland.art/legacy-russell-glitch-feminism/ and https://www.whitneypow.com/articles/glitch-body-anti-body. [↩]