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 ...

When Arturia announced the MicroFreak in January of 2019 I said “there's nothing stopping Arturia from adding more oscillators down the road through firmware updates.” And the company has not ...

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 ...

Originally developed for telecommunications and military applications in the 1930s, the vocoder, a portmanteau of voice encoder, as a musical tool has become indelibly associated with artists such as ...

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 ...

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 ...

World War II increased the rate of human innovation to a pace unseen in any other period of history. New technology from the era includes everything from synthetic rubber to the atomic bomb to ...

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.

Sometimes a melody just captures your ear in a way that renders you powerless to resist. I've written before about "For You," the R&B-ish ballad recorded by both Stefon Harris and Robert Glasper last ...