DAVE TOMPKINS’ new book is titled How to Wreck a Nice Beach, but it has nothing to do with the BP oil spill, or any coast at all. Instead, the phrase he chose for his book title is how the words “how ...

* Photo: Joseph Maida * From Lil Wayne's cyborg-slick singing on "Lollipop" to the Twiki-tweaked vocals of T-Pain, use of the voice-enhancing software Auto-Tune has reached a fever pitch. But it turns ...

“I couldn’t believe it… I didn’t think anyone in their right mind would use it that way.” Auto-Tune is not just the inhuman warbling debuted by Cher in 1998. This staple of today’s pop music is much ...

T-Pain is tired of hearing the sound of his own, heavily processed voice. Actually, the Tallahassee, Fla., hip-hop star is tired of hearing everybody else simulating the sound of his synthesized voice ...

When T-Pain and his synthesized vocals made their debut with the songs “I’m Sprung” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” three years ago, most people dismissed the hits as novelties and expected the ...

It may have taken longer than expected, but Auto-Tune may finally be dead. Last week, T-Pain told the LA Times that he was hanging up his vocoder. "I'm done with Auto-Tune,” the “Buy U a Drank” singer ...

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 ...

Stop Smiling Books/ Melville House; 335 pp. The room contains two turntables and a microphone. Hulking consoles line the walls, covered in dials and gauges and blinking lights, like the bridge of ...