The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones fromeavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it was repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians, and is now the ubiquitous voice of popular music. In "How to Wreck a NiceBeach"-from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase "how to recognize speech"--music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi researchlabs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune. We see 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 V-E Day, "We must go off " And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing adigital 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 ofmusic's most provocative innovators. "From the Hardcover edition."

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