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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Vocoder

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn

Society & Culture

4.52.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2010

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dave Tompkins is an acclaimed music journalist. His new book, How To Wreck A Nice Beach, is a history of the vocoder from its military applications to its musical ones.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The Sound of Young America is supported in part by Ask Metafilter, thousands of

0:04.2

life's little questions answered, online at ask.metafilter.com

0:08.9

and by Field Notes Brand, makers of American Memo Books and More, now featuring

0:13.6

county fair additions, one for each state in the United States of America.

0:17.6

Field Notes Brand, I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it

0:21.4

down to remember it now, online at fieldnotesbrand.com.

0:26.2

Coverage of the world of comedy on the Sound of Young America is supported by Humber College,

0:31.2

offering a two-year program dedicated to comedy. Students learn stand-up, improv,

0:36.4

acting and writing skills, and perform in the heart of Toronto.

0:40.3

At Humber, we make funny people funnier, more information at HumberComedy.com.

0:56.4

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

1:05.6

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

1:10.3

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

1:16.0

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

1:23.6

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

1:31.4

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

1:37.2

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

1:43.9

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

1:51.6

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

1:59.8

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

2:05.2

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

2:11.0

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

...

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