12/15/2023 0 Comments Korean hip hop history book![]() ![]() Anderson (PhD) works within the fields of Transnational American Studies, Black Internationalism and Global Asias, focusing on cultural studies, including popular culture, media studies, visual culture, audience reception and literature. The vocoder is a dynamic thing - it can be used in ways that are not as intrusive or obvious.Media studies, popular culture, popular music, visual culture, literature and audience and fan receptionĬrystal S. You can run your entire setup through it, and you can use it in ways where you don’t actually hear it at all. As far as the vocoder, I think people will also continue to use it. Tompkins: No, I think Auto-Tune, at least, will also be used correctly because it’s such an important pop tool. (Death of Auto-Tune).” Will it go back underground and then become popular again, or is it really dead? I did hear that Alan Turing, the chief British cryptanalyst, sampled Churchill’s voice and some of his speeches and ran them through the vocoder, but I never managed to confirm that.īillboard: Now the vocoder seems to have reached saturation point, with the last Kanye West album and Jay-Z’s “D.O.A. ![]() I found a woman who said there were transcripts but not audio recordings, so you can’t sample Churchill on the vocoder. No one knows if any records of this still exist, though. Tompkins: He’s the original speech synthesizer. Prime Minister) Churchill was on it all the time.īillboard: So Churchill was the T-Pain of his day? But (President) Eisenhower loved it, and (U.K. (General Douglas) MacArthur refused to use it, as did (General George) Patton. Despite this, a lot of people refused to use it. ![]() The technology was very primitive and it wasn’t an easy thing to use you had to synchronize turntables across the globe, but it still worked, which is kind of a feat. But it did work during World War II, in the sense that it was never compromised. Tompkins: A lot of people didn’t trust it. But studios had them and artists could use them to record.īillboard: It never really worked for the military and intelligence, did it? In the book, you mention that John F. In the ‘70s, it was very expensive - not something you could just go out and buy. But then the Germans started making weird robot records, and the hip-hop crowd discovered it. When it was commissioned by the military, it went underground for a while. In all the early Bell Labs tests, they clearly saw it had a place in music and film for sound effects. When the vocoder was invented, the people working on it had already envisioned it for entertainment purposes. Tompkins: The Germans were the ones who first used it for musical purposes. I think that it helped that I took a long time on it, because I didn’t come across a lot of good information about the device and its history until the past two years.īillboard: How did the vocoder go from being a government intelligence device that encrypted speech transmissions to being a staple of hip-hop? I would be working on vocoder research and then jump off and do something else to support myself, save some money, and then go back to the book. Tompkins: It was a combination of the two. Is that because you only worked on it intermittently, or because there was so much history to trace? So that was the genesis of the book, and it mutated from there.īillboard: The whole thing wound up taking 10 years to complete. And then I would go to the record store in downtown Charlotte and look at the walls with rows of 12-inches and pick two to buy every week. ![]() I was hearing it on the radio, the local black station in Concord, North Carolina. It was a good way for me to go back to weird childhood stories and the memories associated with this music that was completely new to me at the time. At the outset, I just wanted the opportunity to interview all these guys I grew up listening to. 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 journey from Bell Labs to the top of the charts - and from the Pentagon to the nightclub.īillboard spoke to Tompkins about his inspirations for the project - which was published in March by Stop Smiling Books/Melville House - and why Winston Churchill was the original T-Pain.īillboard: How did you come to write this book? After all, it’s not every day someone says, “I think I want to write the definitive history of the vocoder.”ĭave Tompkins: Well, I actually did say that at some point. ![]()
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