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. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research ...

Originally developed for telecommunications and military applications in the 1930s, the vocoder, a portmanteau of voice encoder, as a musical tool has become indelibly associated with artists such as ...

From Stevie Wonder and Queen to Vangelis and Dua Lipa, we bring you a short musical history of this influential vocoder When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission ...