Dave Tompkins' book HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH: THE VOCODER FROM WORLD WAR II TO HIP-HOP on technologies of speech recognition, electroacoustic devices, intelligence services, war and pop culture is more than just a history of the vocoder from World Word II to Hip-Hop, as its title suggests. Exploring the intersecting and interfering fields of pop culture and military-industrial research Tompkins leaves the secure base of a media-technological a-priori to show how aliens, formants and transformants have participated in the making of our listening culture. Tompkins' book uses acoustic puns to project the ambiguity of its subject on the reader. It is both illuminative and irritating, a novel on the memory of acousmatic voices, on voices from nowhere, from outer space, from childhood memories of the seventies and eighties and from the laboratories.
