Interesting stuff. Dave Tompkins has written a book about vocoders called "How To Wreck a Nice Beach".

From Melvillehouse Publishing:

"This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase "how to recognize speech"—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets."

Here's a clip where FADER TV meets Dave Tompkins.

Youtube via TheFaderTeam