How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop. The Machine Speaks - Hardcover

Tompkins, Dave

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933633883 ISBN 13: 9781933633886

Verlag: Melville House, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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 from eavesdroppers 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 Nice Beach-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 research labs 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 a digital 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 of music's most provocative innovators.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dave Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, writes frequently on about hip-hop and popular music. His work has appeared in Vibe, The Village Voice, Wax Poetics, and The Believer. Nearly a decade in the making, this is his first book.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Melville House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1933633883
• ISBN 13: 9781933633886
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar