Mar 22, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min · 18 segments
The vocoder was never meant to change the music business – it wasn’t meant for music at all. But the research that started a century ago as a way to cheaply move voices over telephone wires took on a…
David PierceHostCharlie HardingGuestDave 1GuestP-ThuggGuestI worked a whole summer to buy my first software license of, uh, Apple's Logic, their digital audio workstation.
All right, so let's le- I wanna get into kind of the whole history of where this thing came from, because this was a really fun episode for me 'cause I knew nothing about this.
But so the story, as I understand it, starts in-Bell Labs in the 1930s, uh, with this guy named Homer Dudley, which is an extremely 1930s name.
So Homer Dudley was, uh, he was at Bell Labs, which was part of AT&T, so he's thinking about telephones and phone calls, and his big idea was he wanted to figure out how to compress people's voices so that you could send them over copper telegraph lines, specifically under the water to the UK.
I worked a whole summer to buy my first software license of, uh, Apple's Logic, their digital audio workstation.
All right, so let's le- I wanna get into kind of the whole history of where this thing came from, because this was a really fun episode for me 'cause I knew nothing about this.
But so the story, as I understand it, starts in-Bell Labs in the 1930s, uh, with this guy named Homer Dudley, which is an extremely 1930s name.
So Homer Dudley was, uh, he was at Bell Labs, which was part of AT&T, so he's thinking about telephones and phone calls, and his big idea was he wanted to figure out how to compress people's voices so that you could send them over copper telegraph lines, specifically under the water to the UK.
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