Description

The real history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Governmentis talk scrambling weaponThe vocoder, created by Bell Labs in 1928, once protected telephones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-changing device for artists, and has become the common voice of popular music. In Just how to Destroy a Pleasant Beach—from a mis-reading of the vocoder-made expression “how to identify speech”—music correspondent Dave Tompkins traces the real history of digital sounds from Nazi study laboratories to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Reasonable to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Track. We begin to see the vocoder brush-up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who exploded, when vocoderized on V-E Day, “We should set off!” And today vocoder engineering is just a mobile phone standard, permitting an electronic reproduction of one's speech to seem individual. From T-Mobile to T-Pain, Just how to Wreck a Pleasant Beach is just a captivating tale of tradition and engineering, lighting the job of a number of music’s many sexy innovators.From the Hardcover version.