NEW YORK (Billboard) - Half art book, half music nerd bathroom reading, Dave Tompkins' long-in-the-works history of the vocoder, "How to Wreck a Nice Beach," chronicles the sound synthesizing system's ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

* 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 ...

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 ...

When T-Pain and his synthesized vocals made their debut with the songs “I’m Sprung” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” three years ago, most people dismissed the hits as novelties and expected the ...

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 ...

It may have taken longer than expected, but Auto-Tune may finally be dead. Last week, T-Pain told the LA Times that he was hanging up his vocoder. "I'm done with Auto-Tune,” the “Buy U a Drank” singer ...