"How to wreck a nice beach"

Souncheck has a fun and illuminating segment on the vocoder that tracks the history of the technology from Trans-Atlantic communication and military security to pop-music abuse by the likes of Cher and T-Pain.

Dave Tompkins is author of "How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks" -- the core title is a play on bad translation of "How to recognize speech" -- and chronicles all kinds of wrinkles on a technology that started out to clean up speech but now is used artistically to distort speech.

From the book's website:

"We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, Solzhenitsyn, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, JFK, Eisenhower, Neil Young, Kanye West, the Cylons, Walt Disney, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, 'We must go off!' "

Fascinating stuff. Let's hope society takes the vocoder back in a better direction, such as restoring voice to people, like film critic Roger Ebert, who can no longer speak.