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 ...

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 ...

This is the under-the-hood view of the keyboard for the Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator), the first electronic device capable of generating continuous human speech. It accomplishes this feat ...

AT the World's Fairs in New York and San Francisco great interest was shown in the speech synthesizer shown in the Bell System exhibits. In the December number of the Bell Laboratories Record, H.

Before T-Pain was using Auto-Tune to buy girls drinks, Franklin D. Roosevelt was using the vocoder to win World War II. In “How to Wreck a Nice Beach,” music critic Dave Tompkins (The Wire, Vibe) ...

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 ...

Arturia's MiniFreak is one of our favourite synths released in the past few years, a versatile and affordable hybrid analogue/digital poly that gained even more creative firepower following a ...

The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine. sort of alienated from your body. It ...