So the National Defense Research Committee commissioned Bell Labs in 1942 to develop a machine - and Bell Labs delivered. Roosevelt were being intercepted and deciphered by the Germans, it decided to invest in speech-encoding technology. government discovered that Winston Churchill's conversations with Franklin D. Tompkins says the machine played a significant role in World War II. It's called How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop. Music journalist Dave Tompkins has written a book about the vocoder and its unlikely history. Rather, it was developed to decrease the cost of long-distance calls and has taken on numerous other uses since.
Though the vocoder has found its way into music, the machine was never intended for that function. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T. 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. Hear Neil Young's 'Transformer Man' on YouTube
