Daft Punk

Having mastered side-chain compression -- a studio trick that gives the impression of a giant bellows sucking all the air out of the room between every whooshing chord -- on Homework, Daft Punk needed a new gimmick for the follow-up. They found it in Auto-Tune, which made Romanthony's voice wriggle like the invading insects in that old Atari game, "Caterpillar." Suddenly, the vocoder -- a different kind of voice synthesis, one Daft Punk had already used on "Around the World" -- sounded old hat. This was the real future, heralded by a digital whippoorwill.