How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop
Its successor is Auto-Tune, the pitch-correcting software prominent in popular music today. The vocoder is less prevalent in today's popular music, but its legacy lives on. The futuristic sounds complemented the synthesizer, which became widely heard in music from that decade. Michael Jonzun recorded what is believed to be the first hip-hop vocoder album, Lost in Space, in 1983. Later, in the 1980s, the vocoder became the voice of electro-funk hip-hop. It fit perfectly, Tompkins says, because the band's work was primarily electronic. The German band Kraftwerk was one of the first musicians to employ it in its work. As the vocoder evolved, they knew the voice but had no idea where it came from."Īfter A Clockwork Orange, though it was still an expensive technology, the vocoder saw wider use in music studios. "Essentially, that introduced the vocoder to its first major audience," he says. Carlos did a vocoder interpretation of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Tompkins says exposed the vocoder in unprecedented ways. The vocoder experienced a major transition from military device to musical effect when Wendy Carlos used it on the soundtrack for 1971's A Clockwork Orange. "Eisenhower did not want to sound like a chipmunk." "They didn't mind world leaders sounding like robots, just as long as they didn't sound like chipmunks," he says. Intelligibility of speech sometimes proved a problem, but Tompkins says pitch control was a bigger concern. So the National Defense Research Committee commissioned Bell Labs in 1942 to develop a machine - and Bell Labs delivered. Roosevelt were being intercepted and deciphered by the Germans, it decided to invest in speech-encoding technology. government discovered that Winston Churchill's conversations with Franklin D. Tompkins says the machine played a significant role in World War II. It's called How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop. Music journalist Dave Tompkins has written a book about the vocoder and its unlikely history. Rather, it was developed to decrease the cost of long-distance calls and has taken on numerous other uses since. Though the vocoder has found its way into music, the machine was never intended for that function. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T. 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. Hear Neil Young's 'Transformer Man' on YouTube