How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks

by Dave Tompkins

The history of the how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon

The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it was repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians, and is now the ubiquitous voice of popular music.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach —from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech”—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.

We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human.

From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music’s most provocative innovators.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Technology, Science, Reference, Hip Hop

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Must every sentance be a verbal quagmire? While the vocoder produces mildly hallucinagenic sound effects and the cold war may have been an excercise in mass paranoia, the text probably didn't need to be such a psychedelic passage through space-time. I don't know if this book needed to strive toward Schedule A status, all the acrobatics did not seem particularly rewarding.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

This writer is crazy and that's exactly how you should be when you are talking to members of the Troutman family and the guy from Chromeo about diseases you get from doing concerts with the Talk Box, which means having a tube stuck in your mouth for hours. A tube that is cared for by musicians, not doctors.

There's a section about Chapel Hill and the vocoder in which the author walks by Michael Jordan at UNC Basketball camp in 1983. This is one page away from the part about "Scorpio" and how Rick James...fuck it read this book.

Part of this book is a biography of Rammellzee. Part of this booREAD THIS BOOK.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish every book was this book.

[David]

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode...

[Bob Brennan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the subject matter of this book fascinating; however, the writing style was incredibly distracting. If you have the patience for the writing, you will love this book.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt that the first half was stronger than the second half but all of it was pretty solid.

[Patrick Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tompkins has an astounding depth of knowledge on display here, and this is clearly the product of a life-long love/obsession. But his writing is so constantly veering into metaphor it's astoundingly confusing at times. Maybe he's trying to replicate the disorientation one felt when hearing vocoders for the first time?

[Tim Murray · Rating 1 out of 5]

I realised I never write reviews for five star books and that is because you don't really need to. They are perfect. Whenever I give a book 1 star I feel I need to justify it and make it clear that I did not do it lightly.

So, the entire reason that this book gets 1 star is that it is unreadable. Every sentence is so filled with metaphor, recursion, assumed knowledge and slang that I had no idea what it was talking about at any point. This is exactly what everyone else has said too, but some of them seem to have been able to understand enough to give it a reasonable review. So, here is a test case. This is the first paragraph in a section and so has not been taken out of context. If this paragraph is clear then give it a go, otherwise, don't touch it.

"Homer W. Dudley invented the vocoder when he realized that his mouth was a radio station while flat on his back in a Manhattan hospital bed, eyes on the ceiling, a goldfish as his witness. It was October 1928, a year before the stock market fell on its head. The end of the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Germany had electromagnetic tape. Bell Labs, the research division of At&T, had already broadcast Herbert Hoover's forehead on a televised signal. They had also sent a fax, invented negative feedback, and coined Quality Assurance - the nebulous back-pat of automated speech recognition menus, less assurance than a promise that someone in a building without windows was eavesdropping."

or how about:
"The future would be like this: a drunk passed out in a simulated front yard. There were miniature freeways and manmade lightning. Model homes and model cities. Artifice was in. At the Firestone Farm, men in headsets triggered barnyard noises. Oinks, ribbits, lows, clucks and grunts. Yawps, quacks, chirps and peeps. Chimp hysterics. Birdtalk. The real animals weren't really into it. The real monkeys got sick and the real ducks ate most of the frogs."

[Charles Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is MUSIC HISTORY with science, technology, culture and society history: fascinating;

COMPLETIST and worthy; a UNIQUE authorial voice: Dave Tompkins writes music speak GOOD;

What is a VOCODER? A MACHINE that TALK LIKE ROBOTS. But first, a room-sized electro acoustical apparatus that works by analyzing the sound of a modulator signal, which is usually a human voice. The modulator signal is split into many frequency bands. The level of each band is sent as a signal to a corresponding band-pass filter. The filter is set to the same frequency that was analyzed.
THE VOCODOR were never used for civilian telecommunication: inhuman and robotic. BUT WAIT, this can be a desired effect for creative usage. For musical use..!

a really DEEP DIVE early rock, into disco, techno and hip hop...at times too deep? But Tompkins was a fan, HARDCORE.

THIS IS NOT THAT MURDEROUS CHER SONG THAT WAS AUTO TUNE

Some of the later chapters nearly UNINTELLIGBLE: VOCODOR is not an easy instrument to master; passages of the book read as if actually WRITTEN by an HY-2 vocoder recovered from a Nazi boating expedition.

Or SENNHEISER VSM-201 AMIRITE

The cultural touchstone will TICKLE you and include Dr. Phibes, Giorgio Moroder, HP Lovecraft, Herbie Hancock, JFK, Ray Bradbury, Himmler, Bell Labs, Kenny Loggins, Hitler, Neil Young, Cheech & Chong, Star Trek, Mamie Eisenhower, Himmler, you know, all the unusual suspects.

Funny, ironic history of PLANET VOCODER!

[Harlan · Rating 2 out of 5]

What the funk? This is a brilliant concept for a book, turned into an unedited collection of incomprehensible (unless you already know a lot about funk and early hip hop, not to mention a lot about voice synthesis!) vignettes, gonzo recollections, interviews, and histories. There's a lot of great stuff in here, and Tompkins had incredible sources and insights into how the encryption tool turned into a pop music tool. But I think that this would make a vastly better film documentary, or interactive web site, than book, particularly for an audience that's not nearly as culture-aware as Tompkins is.

[Austin Gaines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone ranting about the vocoder for 350 pages and throwing in random jokes. Great pictures. I’m pretty sure the writer never fully explained much of the science behind the vocoder. However, he seemed to have a great time writing the book. It jumps around from the military applications of the vocoder to electro to rap to sci fi movies. Then it touches on talk boxes and other things. He ends the book by spending way too much time talking about his buddy Rammellzee who doesn’t have a ton to do with the vocoder. But who wants to read a boring book about something as goofy as the vocoder? I dug this.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ambitious, wide-ranging dive through the military-industrial-funk-hip-hop complex. Which I didn't know was a thing, and I suppose it's not, but this book makes a case that it sorta is. Combines tech and zeitgeist in a fresh, unexpected, and freewheeling manner. A lot of fun. I can't say I was able to predict what was coming in the next ten pages at any point, and the constant surprises were amusing and informative and outrageous more often (MUCH more often) than not.

Oddball outsider nonfiction. Great stuff.

[Des Bladet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one really is great, though, if you have any taste for Mad Pynchonesque Secret Histories, which here range over the use of vocoding as a compression technique and encryption platform from WWII through to Vietnam and the Cold War hotlines between Washington and London as well as its use as an effect in many fine disco records. Tompkins impressively mad achievement is to create a style and tone in which these feel like different sides of the same resonantly esoteric story.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick re-read of one of my all-time favourites after getting it back from a friend I loaned it to for years. It's a perfect book, managing to marry military history, music industry minutiae and beautiful prosaic imagery. It's got great photographic references, a pleasing layout, some insightful lists in the back too, it's a book I'll treasure forever and revisit many times again.

[Jamesmhebert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Written as though it was spouted from a long, LSD-induced weekend. Very hard to follow. Dream-sequence history makes for cognitive analysis just to figure out what each sentence was intended to convey.

Not worth the effort to decode the story.

[Cameron Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

First I thought, how wonderful, a non-conventional non-fiction book that is so interesting and reads more like urban legend. I really got into it. But then it got muddy

[Bojana Radovanović · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impressive research done on a compelling subject. However, writing style is somewhat tiring and often hard to follow.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ffffrrreeeeeesssh.

[Agnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gets a bit technical, but if you're into the nitty-gritty of music tech and its impact on genres, it's decent. Not a game-changer, but not a snoozer either.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tompkins, a hip-hop critic and journalist, humorously and irreverently explains the history of the vocoder, from its origins in the 1920s as a Bell Labs invention to encrypt speech and aid in long-distance communication to its use as a covert intelligence tool in World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam, to its use as a sound effects device in radio, film, and television, and, finally, its importance in electro, hip-hop, rock, and pop music as the robot voice we all love. Tompkins finds so many odd, surprising connections between disparate pockets of pop culture and modern history, thanks to the vocoder, particularly the numerous connections between Sun Ra and New Kids on the Block in the mid-1980s (seriously). A hugely entertaining read, this book is one of the few that will be enjoyed by both World War II buffs and freakazoids. Ray Bradbury, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Zapp and Roger, Joseph Stalin, Neil Young, ELO, Richard Nixon, H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Frampton, Stevie Wonder, Rammellzee, Franklin Roosevelt, Adolph Hitler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa, Whodini, Holger Czukay, Forrest Ackerman, Cybotron, Michael Jackson, Vincent Price, "Weird" Al Yankovic, Jonzun Crew, and T-Pain all play a role in this story. It's the kind of book that makes you recite quotes from it to the other people in the room. My current favorite, from Roger Troutman's talk box tech Bigg Robb: "We all gotta leave here sometime, and hopefully, it'll be at ninety-five, in our sleep, with a couple of big-booty old ladies feeding us grapes and ice cream."

[Joshua Finnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Library Journal Review:

Anyone who has ever spoken into an electric fan appreciates the magic of voice manipulation. Throughout history, altering one's voice has been used to deceive as well as entertain. Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, traces the strange history of the most famous robot-voice-making machine, the vocoder. Oscillating between political figures and popular musicians, Tompkins analyzes the various uses of the vocoder through its function and purpose. He excels at contextualization as he vividly describes voice manipulation as used during times of war and peace, from Stalin to New Edition. The figures in this story are as compelling as the machine itself. Although his writing style can be frenetic at times, Tompkins holds together the complete story of the vocoder while elaborating on the number of individuals responsible for its creation and popularity. VERDICT Seamlessly integrating many stories into a single narrative, Tompkins presents a masterly history of the vocoder. This fun and informational book will appeal to readers interested in the history of technology and the evolution of electronic music.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dave Tompkins' book was published a few years too early. In about five year' time, all books will be published in multimedia formats, and a book about the development of the vocorder, the voice-mimicking machine, will come with sound files so you can hear how the machine evolved and how it was used. Until ebooks are more common, Tompkins is the writer you need to guide you through the birth and growth of the instrument best known as that annoying sound the only Peter Frampton album you ever bought. Tompkins has an ability to step aside from traditional narrative structure and put words together in a way that make you read more with your ears than eyes. This works especially when he tells how the vocorder was used to mask voices over phone lines during World War II, as Tompkins' whimsical spin breathes some colorful life into the technical doings of corporate and military R and D. In the last part of the book, however, he lost me in the crazy angles of olde-skool electronic music, and that is especially where some sound clips would have helped me understand how DJs and mixmasters were using the vocorder to revolutionize music.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely hard book to describe or even categorize. I f*ing loved it. Tompkins writes a non-linear social history of the vocoder, encompassing both its WWII-era origins (as a proto-digital means of effectively scrambling high-level communications between, say, Churchill and Roosevelt) to its celebrated role in early 80s electrofunk and hip hop, and manages to convince us that all of this happened simultaneously, these two vastly different cultural moments somehow in two-way (yet totally scrambled) dialogue with one another. As a piece of 20th-century technology history (I always wondered why the guys leading the ARPA project in the early 60s were all into psychoacoustics) this is first rate: he digs through the archives, and also digs up the few old, old men who are still alive and asks them about their work (while playing Afrika Bambaataa at them). As a guide to the embryonic Detroit, NYC, and Miami techno/dance scenes, this is just brilliant. I assembled a Spotify playlist to accompany my reading... you know where to find me on there if you're interested. This is 5 stars, because it changed the way I see the world.

[Taffnerd · Rating 4 out of 5]

The vocodor is a device that was developed to encrypt sensitive telephone communication. The process made the speaker sound like a robot which was a small price to pay for Churchill to monitor the allied troups or for JFK to pass on sensitive information during the Cuban missile crisis.

When the technology was declassified in the early 70's the vocodor found it's way into the hands of early electronic and hip hop musicians who added it to their growing synthesizer racks and influenced countless artists to come. You've heard it whether you knew it or not: Michael Jackson's "PYT", Laurie Anderson's "O, Superman", Kraftwork, Midnight Star, Phil Collins and on.

Tompkins is a fun and engaging writer who makes the details of electronic circuits, cold war fear and early dance music culture equally interesting.

[Autumn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains worlds within worlds. Some are familiar (Wrightsville Beach, Jam On It by Newcleus, an empty bottle of Texas Pete) and some are beyond esoteric (Ray Bradbury's teen years, Churchill's secret phone, Rammellzee's apartment). Time has no meaning and EVERYTHING is connected. For best effect, this book should be enjoyed with a highly caffeinated beverage and Youtube handy.

You are going to meet many inventors -- from the inventors of compression technology to the inventor of bubble letters. This singular work is a salute to people who live in the future and who are kind enough to bring some of it back for the rest of us. In fact, some of that has rubbed off on Dave Tompkins because he has written a new kind of book.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this clenches it, I'm an unabashed music nerd, I geeked out on this hip hop/funk meets military-industrial progress book.

Written like the music inspired by the vocoder and it's affiliate technologies, this book is all over the place, but still always intelligible, and jammed up with great anecdotes and histories of the technologies' creators as interlocutors for the great history of hip hop and the funk sounds that preceded it.

It's wacky, but if you like tech, and you ever wanted to know how Roger Troutman (see Zapp) was such a pimp...this is your chance!

I know Troutman was using a "talk-box," not a vocoder...but you get the idea.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a point where Tompkins cites Pynchon for the first time, and you think: right. How did it possibly take so long.

In two words: aw yis. Such a great book--twisty, unpredictable--about something I will confess I had never actually thought about. I think I love nearly all of writer's fits of connective fancy, which make the vocoder something like the central technology of the twentieth century. This is probably what Benjamin would have read like closer to his own moment, before the hagiography began: attentive to the seemingly most absurd connections, endlessly interested in finding the big picture in the tiny detail.

[Molly Tolsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look here, this book is awesome.

It's hands down some of the best writing I've read as of late, and if you know me, you know I don't often say that about non-fiction. Tompkins comes up with the kind of smart phrases I couldn't even dream of writing, and it's funny, too, replete with Simpsons quotes.

I didn't really know anything or care much about the vocoder before reading, but I got completely sucked in, and I now spend my nights youtubing videos of all the songs Tompkins mentions in the book. So what I'm saying is, it's good, real good.

[Tom Throckmorton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and somewhat unexpected - I picked this up based on a recommendation, and was pleasantly surprised. The military-industrial-crypto historical perspective appealed to my inner geek, and Dave's presentation of the evolution of synthetic/augmented speech/sound within several musical genres was compelling. At first my brain wasn't jibing with the writing style, but as the book progressed, I found myself immersed in his perspective. As the person who recommended it said, 'this book is 100% bananas!'

[Quan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dave Tompkins is a hell of a writer. At times, he leaves me completely stunned, frozen from the beauty of his words.

The main obstacle I'm facing with this book has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with the medium. When he writes about music, I want to stop and hear the music he's writing about. Which means that it gets hard to read the book because, to get the full experience, I also need Youtube ready at my disposal. This should come with an accompanying music album to load up on my mp3 player.