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"I've come across more and more people who've actually tried reading science fiction and can't make it make sense."
- Samuel R. Delany

Tik-Talker  
  A method of scrambling spoken speech for encoded transmission.  

He had been abducted from his home in Ann Arbor sometime Sunday night. He could not remember how, nor what his captors had looked like. There was a long ride somewhere in some sort of vehicle, a strange room, and blindingly bright lights. . .

And the questions. . . .

“Who was questioning you?”

“I couldn’t see. Just a voice. An odd voice.”

“A human voice?”

“No. Definitely not . . . not what I heard.” The old man hesitated. “It didn’t make sense, but I was sure it was a tik-talker.”

Bahr’s eyebrows went up. The tik-talker reduced speech to a burst of seven pulse characters, reassembling and unscrambling them at the receiving end. It was quite reliable, but the speech itself always had the tonal curiosities of electronically sliced language, and was easily identified by anyone who had ever heard it before.

Technovelgy from The Sign of the Tiger, by Alan Nourse (w/Meyer).
Published by Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1958
Additional resources -

Another quote:

The tik-talker reduced speech to a burst of seven pulse characters, reassembling and unscrambling them at the receiving end. It was quite reliable, but the speech itself always had the tonal curiosities of electronically sliced language, and was easily identified by anyone who had heard it before. Other men who were questioned all confirmed the "curious singsong of a tik-talker intermediary."

We think of unusual speech effects as being part of the modern era, but compare the Tik-Talker to the multiple sample voice used in Nat Schachner's 1937 story The Shining One, which provided "that queer, slurred, alien-sounding accent of the future".

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Sign of the Tiger
  More Ideas and Technology by Alan Nourse (w/Meyer)
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