Access All Areas: Voyage of the Vocoder

Long before Autotune became the trendy vocal-effect-of-choice there was the Vocoder. Invented in 1928 to protect telephone conversations from eavesdropping, the Vocoder was soon adopted by like Kraftwerk, Africa Bambatta through to Neil Young and Laurie Anderson. For Access All Areas Trevor Reekie talks to journalist-turned-author Dave Tompkins to map the voyage of the vocoder and to find out how popular culture hijacked the Pentagon's secret speech scrambling weapon.