D.O.A.

Last month Jay-Z proclaimed the death of autotune, a digital effect with it's roots in analog vocoders developed early in the 20th century.



Originally developed with the telecommunications industry in mind, the technology was eventually discovered by musicians who began to incorperate it into compositions as a novelty.



The Sonovox


Here's a clip of Alvino Rey whose 'singing guitar' used technology that would eventually become the Talkbox.

Along with the vocoder, the talkbox was frequently dismissed as a gimmick.
Nonetheless these devices that electronically merge the voice with instrumentation found their way onto a huge number of records, across genres and across decades throughout the 20th century.



Around The World Daft Punk, directed by Michel Gondry (not)



Battlecat using a Talkbox.



Mack Maine with Lil Wayne on autotune


Autotune, B.o.B.