If you've listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you've probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research ...

The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine. sort of alienated from your body. It ...

Before T-Pain was using Auto-Tune to buy girls drinks, Franklin D. Roosevelt was using the vocoder to win World War II. In “How to Wreck a Nice Beach,” music critic Dave Tompkins (The Wire, Vibe) ...

The vocoder—code name Special Customer, the Green Hornet, Project X-61753, X-Ray, and SIGSALY—started distorting human speech in earnest during World War II, in response to the excellence of German ...

#50. Snoop Dogg "Sexual Eruption" This has nothing to do with rankings, not to mention taste, but it's just best to just go ahead and get this out of the way. Snoop's voice is enhanced by Auto-Tune, ...

From Stevie Wonder and Queen to Vangelis and Dua Lipa, we bring you a short musical history of this influential vocoder When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission ...

When Arturia announced the MicroFreak in January of 2019 I said “there's nothing stopping Arturia from adding more oscillators down the road through firmware updates.” And the company has not ...

Next up in our guide to making music with the internet's most capable freeware, we decode the mysteries of the vocoder When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.