Dave Tompkins on the Vocoder

Before there was language, there was the voice. Today we celebrate the voice. Music journalist Dave Tompkins has written about the long and colorful history of the vocoder in his book "How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks." He tells Jim Fleming the title comes from what people think the vocoder is saying when it voices the phrase "How to recognize speech."