num_pages: 336
description: The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weaponThe vocoder invented by Bell Labs in 1928 once guarded phones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War it was repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and is now the ubiquitous voice of popular music. In How to Wreck a Nice Beachfrom a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase how to recognize speechmusic journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalins gulags from the 1939 Worlds Fair to Hiroshima from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR JFK Stanley Kubrick Stevie Wonder Neil Young Kraftwerk the Cylons Henry Kissinger and Winston Churchill who boomed when vocoderized on V-E Day We must go off! And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human. From T-Mobile to T-Pain How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture illuminating the work of some of musics most provocative innovators.
language: English
title: How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks
publisher: Stop Smiling Books