A closer look
Every time you hear a heavily autotuned pop star or a robot voice in an EDM track, you owe a begrudging nod to Harald Bode. Long before synthesizers were cool, this German engineer was obsessed with manipulating sound, developing some of the first modular synthesizers and pioneering early vocoder technology. His mid-century experiments in frequency shifting, ring modulation, and slicing human speech into synthetic frequencies basically laid the technological groundwork for the next seventy years of electronic music.
