Consider the vocoder. Invented at Bell Labs in 1928 to mimic the human voice, the hope was that the machine would better transmit speech underwater—say, across the Atlantic. Seventeen years later, Truman and Churchill would use the technology to discuss the terms of German surrender over a secure line. In between, the device would sing "Barnacle Bill" at a 1936 celebration at Harvard and capture the imagination of a young Ray Bradbury, who first encountered it at the 1939 New York World's Fair. When the '80s and rap hit, the vocoder would become "the main machine of electro hip-hop, the black voice removed from itself, displaced by Reaganomics, recession and urban renewal," according to Dave Tompkins's virtuoso new... More >>>