Brad Nelson’s Reviews > How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks > Status Update

Auto-Tune is better known for its imperfection, a quality more human than robotic. (Robotic is the world in which everyone sings perfectly without even knowing it.) Set the retune function to zero and the pitch seems to be scaled instantaneously rather than a natural slide between notes, resulting in hyperactive birdcall tremolo, a jagged melisma.

Since she's eleven years old, hers is a world where speech is highly destructible and better off for it. The word like has become a speaking mechanism itself, a mimetic filter. Everything is like something. Nothing is what it is. This chatty substitute, its "likeness," is often compressed through cell phones as a digital replica of the vocal tract, a binary of buzz and hiss.

As a diver, [Rammellzee] became acquainted with the bends, the narcosis, euphoria and bad judgment caused by decompression. This can be avoided by inhaling an elixir of oxygen and helium, which has less density than air. Pushing against a gas of low density, vocal cords encounter less resistance and vibrate more rapidly, in higher frequencies. Bell Labs' Manfred Schroeder calls it "restoration of the Donald Duck."

In "Beat Bop," Rammel may have taken K-Rob's moralizing—"You may as well work at the sanitation"—as a challenge, fashioning indecipherable letters from unwanted trinkets, Tonka mini-monster wheels, doorknobs, a fake candle stolen from the chandelier of an Italian restaurant, nozzles, Voltron's elbow. These are his building blocks, his broken language. Something from nothing.

Giorgio Moroder was born with a vocoder installed in his name. Moroder also never returned my emails, triggering a recurrent disco nap nightmare where I'm driving an easy chair (or leather couch, something from Monty Python's furniture races) down I-85 South to Moroder's "Faster than the Speed of Love." Speech is shaped from darkness and filtered through the mustache in the rearview mirror.

The instrumental of "It's Your Rock" was done alone in the studio at night while the rest of us dreamed it. The track doesn't begin so much as emerge, a subway at the tunnel's mouth, a roar that never actually passes, looped four times, each haunted by its own reverb. This is the sound of what you cannot see coming, the approach of tunnel darkness itself.

While "Nasty Rock" was locally grown, the next track on Nate's tape made you forget your asthmatic friends and yell "fuck" in front of your own mother. Called "Scorpio," its vocoder could've belonged to the giant adenoid of Lord Blatherard Osmo, which grew the size of a city block and had to be neutralized with electroshock, gas and cocaine.

Whatever passed through the vocoder from Washington to Saigon, Rik Davis lived it in the clearing of the jungles, where Kissinger had quantified bombing to "the bejeesus," as if unaccountable. "Clear has a military value," Davis says. Securing an area of operation could mean slaughtering the village. "Clear our displays," their actions. Clear is classified, redacted. The human blank.

"That's the idea," says Davis. "It's all coming down from above. 'Clear' is outside what exists." What I saw outside that day was a swirl of dead leaves chasing each other in the street like children. As if something had just taken off. The song ends in a turbine swoosh, leaving you behind.

For me, the technological revolution started in a Zenith clock radio inherited from my parents' divorce. "Clear" was the first electro song I heard, an escape from junior high psy-ops. My mother was in the room when it happened, fooling with a dislocated window shade, the sunlight crushed by October, and Les Norman, the Night-Time Master Blaster of WPEG, on the radio. "Clear" came from nowhere, swooping from above.