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It's The Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorne. My guest on this show is the writer Dave

Tompkins. You may not know it, but when you talk on your cellular phone, you're using

technological ideas that were first developed for the vocoder. When it was created,

the vocoder was this huge room-sized machine with huge numbers of vacuum tubes and 12-inch

LPs that had to be synced up perfectly, and it was all an elaborate system to mask the voices

of our allied leaders in World War II. It was in large part an analog machine,

but it was also one of the first digitizations of speech. It broke down speech into its constituent

parts, its separate frequencies to create the codes. The technology that was in that huge

code-making vocoder in 1944, 20 or 25 years later, became a musical instrument.

Before I talk with Dave Tompkins about his history of the vocoder, how to recognize speech,

let's hear one of the first popular applications of the machine. This is the Wendy Carlos version

of Beethoven's Ninth, recorded for the soundtrack of the film A Clockwork Orange.

...