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 ...

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 ...

Explore the fascinating evolution of the vocoder, talkbox, and Auto-Tune, tracing their journey from Bell Labs through World War II to their influence on Daft Punk in this episode of Version History.

* Photo: Joseph Maida * From Lil Wayne's cyborg-slick singing on "Lollipop" to the Twiki-tweaked vocals of T-Pain, use of the voice-enhancing software Auto-Tune has reached a fever pitch. But it turns ...

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 ...

T-Pain is tired of hearing the sound of his own, heavily processed voice. Actually, the Tallahassee, Fla., hip-hop star is tired of hearing everybody else simulating the sound of his synthesized voice ...

Add Futurism (opens in a new tab) Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. “I couldn’t believe it… ...

Leaving aside the fact that vocoders and Auto-Tune are two totally different technologies — c’mon, Wyclef! — the case made in “Mr. Auto-Tune” has one critical flaw: “Mr. Auto-Tune,” itself, is way ...