Book traces history of vocoder from WWII to hip-hop

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.

Billboard 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.

Billboard: 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."

Dave Tompkins: Well, I actually did say that at some point. At the outset, I just wanted the opportunity to interview all these guys I grew up listening to. 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. I was hearing it on the radio, the local black station in Concord, North Carolina. 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. So that was the genesis of the book, and it mutated from there.

Billboard: The whole thing wound up taking 10 years to complete. Is that because you only worked on it intermittently, or because there was so much history to trace?

Tompkins: It was a combination of the two. 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. 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.

Billboard: How did the vocoder go from being a government intelligence device that encrypted speech transmissions to being a staple of hip-hop?

Tompkins: The Germans were the ones who first used it for musical purposes. When the vocoder was invented, the people working on it had already envisioned it for entertainment purposes. In all the early Bell Labs tests, they clearly saw it had a place in music and film for sound effects. When it was commissioned by the military, it went underground for a while. But then the Germans started making weird robot records, and the hip-hop crowd discovered it. In the '70s, it was very expensive -- not something you could just go out and buy. But studios had them and artists could use them to record.

Billboard: It never really worked for the military and intelligence, did it? In the book, you mention that John F. Kennedy hated it.

Tompkins: A lot of people didn't trust it. But it did work during World War II, in the sense that it was never compromised. 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. Despite this, a lot of people refused to use it. (General Douglas) MacArthur refused to use it, as did (General George) Patton. But (President) Eisenhower loved it, and (U.K. Prime Minister) Churchill was on it all the time.

Billboard: So Churchill was the T-Pain of his day?

Tompkins: He's the original speech synthesizer. No one knows if any records of this still exist, though. I found a woman who said there were transcripts but not audio recordings, so you can't sample Churchill on the vocoder. 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.

Billboard: Now the vocoder seems to have reached saturation point, with the last Kanye West album and Jay-Z's "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)." Will it go back underground and then become popular again, or is it really dead?

Tompkins: No, I think Auto-Tune, at least, will also be used correctly because it's such an important pop tool. As far as the vocoder, I think people will also continue to use it. You can run your entire setup through it, and you can use it in ways where you don't actually hear it at all. The vocoder is a dynamic thing -- it can be used in ways that are not as intrusive or obvious.