Dave Tompkins is an acclaimed music journalist. His new book, How To Wreck A Nice Beach, is a history of the vocoder from its military applications to its musical ones.

The vocoder—part military technology, part musical instrument—has had quite a history. In our new Object of Interest video, we explore the vocoder in settings ranging from the Second World War ...

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 ...

Sometimes a melody just captures your ear in a way that renders you powerless to resist. Sometimes it has a long history behind it too.

The unique sound of the Vocoder is synonymous with the future, and thanks to Zynaptiq, the future’s looking particularly orange… ...

VirSyn has released the first publicly available third-party audio plug-in with VST3 support, Matrix Vocoder. VST3 is a new audio standard developed by Steinberg that offers developers new tools ...

Arturia is celebrating this major update by also releasing a new limited edition white MicroFreak packaged with a gooseneck microphone. I’ve got to say, the new look is pretty spectacular. The ...

Before T-Pain was using Auto-Tune to buy girls drinks, Franklin D. Roosevelt was using the vocoder to win World War II. In “How to Wreck a Nice Beach,” music critic Dave Tompkins (The Wire ...

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 ...

How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop by Dave Tompkins (Stop Smiling Books; $35) World War II increased the rate of human innovation to a pace unseen in any other ...