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 ...

Softube has introduced Vocoder, a new plugin that delivers exactly what its name implies. Offering the look and feel of a vintage vocoder, this features a six-voice carrier synth with four selectable ...

#50. Snoop Dogg "Sexual Eruption" This has nothing to do with rankings, not to mention taste, but it's just best to just go ahead and get this out of the way. Snoop's voice is enhanced by Auto-Tune, ...

The vocoder—part military technology, part musical instrument—has had quite a history. In our new Object of Interest video, we explore the vocoder in settings ranging from the Second World War to ...

It is hard to remember that scant decades ago, electronic magazines — the pre-Internet equivalent of blogs — featured lots of audio circuits based on analog processing. Music synthesizers were popular ...

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 ...

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 ...

A scientific tool for those lacking a voice, a means of encrypting voices during World War II, and a way to drop the funk, the vocoder has had many exhale its praises, from General Dwight D.

Next up in our guide to making music with the internet's most capable freeware, we decode the mysteries of the vocoder When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.