Two weeks ago, Stop Smiling Books and Melville House launched Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach at two New York bookstores: Brooklyn’s BookCourt and Soho’s McNally Jackson. The events were wildly successful: both venues sold out of books — and the book landed at the #3 spot on BookCourt’s bestseller list, outselling David Remnick‘s The Bridge and Micheal Lewis‘ The Big Short. Below, an account of the McNally Jackson event by Melville House intern Molly Tolsky.

Nearly a year after Jay-Z called for the death of auto-tune, the pitch correcting device that’s been made famous by the likes of T-Pain and Wendy’s commercials, a crowd of people gather at the McNally Jackson Bookstore in Manhattan to celebrate the ancestor of auto-tune, the original speech-altering device: the vocoder. Music writer Dave Tompkins, who’s just released the quintessential book on the matter, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, plugs a microphone into the black box that’s set up behind him and begins to speak. He is a robot, his voice a drone of gibberish, a monotoned muffler introducing himself to the laughing crowd. But Tompkins, and his audience, can only take this noise for so long — soon, he switches microphones and brings his own voice back to life, and you can sense the relief of each ear in the room.

It is that black box, the vocoder, that allowed for the secret telephony between FDR and Churchill during World War II; JFK and MacMillan during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Stevie Wonder and a gaggle of six-year-olds on the set of Sesame Street. From its original purpose of improving long-distance calls, the vocoder has gone through a metamorphosis: from wartime essential to pop and hip-hop plaything. But on either side of the two-faced machine, enthusiasts can be found, a devoted militia-a la vinyl snobs or stamp collectors-people so enthused by the vocoder that they want nothing more than to swap tales of its storied past. Tompkins is undoubtedly the leader of the gang. But what is it about this machine, a collection of knobs, inputs, and a mini-keyboard, that gets these people so riled up?

The sheer breadth of its wingspan, maybe. The vocoder and the subsequent family of voice-synthesizers that followed suit have fallen into the hands of everyone from throat cancer doctors to Dr. Dre.  And its effect, too, is greatly varied: the same machine that helped don’t-call-it-a-comeback Cher gain an entirely new generation of listeners in 1998 with her mega auto-tune hit “Believe” caused an outright upheaval with the release of Neil Young‘s 1983 album “Trans.” The album, recorded for Young’s son, who was born with cerebral palsy and an inability to properly speak, used the vocoder as a means to mirror that communication struggle, Young’s voice just barely perceptible, more machine than man. His fans, however, were not pleased with his new heart of electronica, and neither was his record label, who subsequently sued Young for “not being himself.”

But that’s the beauty of the vocoder — it gives you the ability to not sound like yourself for a change. At least that’s what the hip-hop artists thought who first introduced the machine to the music. Afrika Bambaataa, a DJ known for his massive influence over hip-hop in the 1980’s, refers to the vocoder as “deep crazy supernatural bugged-out funk stuff.” Tompkins, who grew up running to the record store at every chance he got after discovering the joys of the hip-hop electro sound, recalls shouting at the clerk, “Tell me what to buy! Give me the weirdest thing you got!”

That’s how it went during the early days of vocoder music — the weirder the better, the funkier and freakier the best. In HTWANB, Tompkins recreates the scene, complete with photographic evidence, of a hot day on Miami Beach in 1983. Michael Jonzun is performing the now iconic vocoder song, “Pack Jam” while dressed as an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, powdered wig and all. His reason may be unknown, but nobody questions him, anyway. The vocoder not only altered an artist’s voice–it altered one’s entire look, giving free reign to dress like an aristocrat, or a robot, or a space man, because, well, why the hell not? Tompkins, recalling why he got into vocoder music in the first place, notes, “It seemed to generate lots of characters.” And so it seems what the New York Times once referred to as “The Machine that Tears Speech to Pieces” tears all expectations to pieces, and lets artists build their identities anew.

That new identity is more dire, at times. The same technology that went into the creation of the early vocoder helped create synthetic larynges, the artificial voice boxes used by patients suffering from any kind of disease that inhibits the use of one’s vocal chords. This offers the life-altering solution to those left without a voice, such as movie critic and cancer survivor, Roger Ebert. In his case, voice synthesizing has even gone so far as to recreate his individual voice, eliminating the robotic Stephen Hawking-like drawl we’ve grown used to. CBS reports that a company in Edinburgh has found a way to use an old audio clip of Ebert, “chop it up into tiny pieces,” and create a unique synthesizer voice that is extraordinarily close to the original. Tearing apart and bringing back together–this is the recycled motto of the vocoderites.

It was in fact the sound of his neighbor’s electric larynx that prompted Jonzun (of French aristocrat fame) to start thinking about the electro-sound at the age of ten. And it works both ways. According to Tompkins, “one current Talk Box artist, P-Thugg from Chromeo, has been approached by a Laryngologist for research in teaching deaf mutes how to speak.” In this way, the trade between science and entertainment has been going on since the very beginning of the vocoder’s life, a symbiosis that one out of the loop might never imagine.

Back in McNally Jackson, after fielding questions from the audience, an after-party is announced at a bar in Williamsburg, where Tompkins, the vocoder-enthused audience, and anyone else that happened to stroll into the bookstore and get sucked into the story of the little-machine-that-could can dance their hearts out to the funky beats of hip-hop’s finest vocoder songs. And it promises to be a good time. With its knobs dipped into the waters of so many different histories, it’s easy to forget the most probable reason that this particular group of New Yorkers ooh and aah over the vocoder — it’s just plain fun.