This one came in via Richard Devine – How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop – a new book on the history of the vocoder.
That was all it took to sell me on the book – but here’s the book summary:
The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon’s speech scrambling weapon
This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.
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 Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets.
The result is an amazing chronicle of postwar music and culture, filled with unexpected and surprising encounters. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, Solzhenitsyn, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, JFK, Eisenhower, Neil Young, Kanye West, the Cylons, Walt Disney, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now the device is a cell phone standard, allowing 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.
If you’ve read How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, leave a comment and let us know if the book is as awesome as it sounds.
How good can it be when he gets his facts wrong in the description? How to “recognize speech using common sense” is a classic example of how we need context to understand a sentence, and not mistake it for the phonetically similar nonsense phrase “wreck a nice beach you sing calm incense”
Which is entirely beside the point to mishearing the vocoded sentence…
Norman, if you feel that strongly about merely the title, you certainly will not enjoy the chaotic disjointed poetic style within. You would not mistake it with linearity. You are NOT his kind of reader.
The context most badly needed within of course, are the sounds he is referencing. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, using short attention span text to describe burping and farting noises actually somehow being related to music and words, is the next level of chaos. He could do with a bit less leadfooting on the metaphor pedal, such as placing Afrika Bambaataa in the midst of cold war intrigue, or otherwise dropping fewer references to some obscure small pressing 12 inch vinyl from the 80s in the midst of describing Bell labs in the thirties. He needs an editor, you, with your particular style of comprehension, would need a curator and a guide.
Someone, perhaps the author, should create an online audio companion to the book. Practically no one other than the author is going to have access to the one off acetates he mentions.
I didn't realize until last week that this book features my good friend Frank Gentges of Metasonics. I'm just back in the UK from spending a week with him at Dayton Hamvention – lovely guy, and very smart. I must get a copy!
I didn't realize until last week that this book features my good friend Frank Gentges of Metavox. I'm just back in the UK from spending a week with him at Dayton Hamvention – lovely guy, and very smart. I must get a copy!