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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine. sort of alienated from your body. It ...

At last! Two months after NYC rap writer Dave Tompkins’ vocoder history/odyssey How To Wreck A Nice Beach finally hit shelves, the long-awaited accompanying mix is done. Mixed by Monk-One, compiled by ...