“My computer blew up on me, but I didn't want to leave the studio without having done anything that day”: How a crashed PC led to the creation of Hide and Seek, the robotic a cappella that introduced millions to the power of vocal processing

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From Kraftwerk’s groundbreaking use of the vocoder through to Auto-Tune’s ubiquity in the contemporary charts, vocal processing has come to dominate the sound of popular music over the past five decades.

But among so many examples of vocal transformation, a handful of artists stand tall in their ingenuity, deploying vocal effects in a way that not only brings decorative flair to a song, but defines it completely, creating something that listeners could never have even imagined before the advent of this technology.