How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop

Tompkins, Dave

ISBN 10: 1933633883 / ISBN 13: 9781933633886

Published by Melville House, New York, 2010

About this Item

Light wear and soiling to pictorial boards, corners slightly rubbed and bumped. Light soiling to text block edges, interior clean. In nice shape.

Seller Inventory # 9045

Bibliographic Details

• Title: How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop
• Publisher: Melville House, New York
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1933633883
• ISBN 13: 9781933633886
• Binding: Hardcover, 334 pages
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Horror
  • Music

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.