NEW YORK (Billboard) - Half art book, half music nerd bathroom reading, Dave Tompkins' long-in-the-works history of the vocoder, "How to Wreck a Nice Beach," chronicles the sound synthesizing system's ...

Stop Smiling Books/ Melville House; 335 pp. The room contains two turntables and a microphone. Hulking consoles line the walls, covered in dials and gauges and blinking lights, like the bridge of ...

If you've listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you've probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research ...

World War II increased the rate of human innovation to a pace unseen in any other period of history. New technology from the era includes everything from synthetic rubber to the atomic bomb to ...

While 2009 saw AutoTune reach an all time high in pop culture, then almost die, the voice modulation effect better known as the vocoder has actually had a storied past that goes all the way back to ...

DAVE TOMPKINS’ new book is titled How to Wreck a Nice Beach, but it has nothing to do with the BP oil spill, or any coast at all. Instead, the phrase he chose for his book title is how the words “how ...

With his book How to Wreck a Nice Beach, Dave Tompkins offered a complex and impeccably-researched history of the vocoder, a device that's been used to manipulate voices for high-ranking military ...

The vocoder—code name Special Customer, the Green Hornet, Project X-61753, X-Ray, and SIGSALY—started distorting human speech in earnest during World War II, in response to the excellence of German ...

We're quite fond of Dave Tompkins' history of the vocoder, How to Wreck a Nice Beach—he wrote it with a winky passion, injecting joie de vivre into a topic that in the wrong hands would have been a ...

NAMELY: Boy, are we happy that Thom Yorke decided to ditch the original name of his supergroup, ????, in favor of the far-more-pronouncable Atoms For Peace (the new name’s taken from a speech by ...

We were lucky enough to catch an early screening of White Bird in a Blizzard, the newest feature from cult director Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, The Living End, Smiley Face). While the hot gossip is ...

Sometimes a melody just captures your ear in a way that renders you powerless to resist. I've written before about "For You," the R&B-ish ballad recorded by both Stefon Harris and Robert Glasper last ...