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

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 World War II...