The secret story of the vocoder, the military tech that changed music forever

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. On Version History: how to play your voice like an instrument, with a little help from Chromeo. If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn’t supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built some pretty neat technology that could both capture and synthesize the human voice. As so much great tech does, the vocoder immediately took on a life of its own. It played a key role in