How to Wreck A Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins

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How to Wreck A Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins

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How to Wreck A Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins

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 I; 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.

From the Hardcover edition.

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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.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781612190921
ISBN 10 1612190928
Title How to Wreck A Nice Beach
Author Dave Tompkins
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Melville House Publishing
Year published 2011-11-08
Number of pages 352
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable