How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip Hop The Machine Speaks

Manufacturer: unknown label US
Product type: Books
Cat no: 978159 0308158  

The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music.

In How To Wreck A Nice Beach, from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase, the How To Recognize Speech, music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.

Dave Tompkins saw 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 the morning before 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 music's most provocative innovators.