The intellectual property behind Cher, T-Pain

Whether or not you know it, you're probably familiar with a technology called vocoder, or at least one of its aural descendants. Remember Cher's 1998 smash Believe? Or how about Peter Frampton's trippy talking guitar antics from the '70's? If you're younger, you may be familiar with T-Pain, whose claim to fame is being on pretty much every other Top 40 song in 2007. It seems musicians from Joe Meek to Kanye West have long embraced some sort of electronic vocal manipulation in both studio and live performances.

According to this month's Wired, all of these artists are indebted to one Homer Dudley who, working for Bell Labs in 1931 filed a patent for a "Carrier Wave Transmission System." You should check out the article; it turns out that the same technology that enabled Kraftwerk to become the darlings of 1970's music geeks also enabled Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt to secretly communicate during WWII.