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

The Verge
By David PierceMar 22, 2026, 9:45 am97 ptsTrending
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…

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