The combination of three levels of enhancement—surgery, makeup, and that old trick of bright lights that flatten the skin surface into a blank dazzle—means that her face and her voice seem to be made out of the same immaterial substance. This is exactly the same business that Auto-Tune and Melodyne are in. The Beatles enthusiastically adopted artificial double-tracking, a process invented by Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend that thickened vocals by placing a doubled recording slightly out of sync with the identical original.
John Lennon also loved to alter the natural timbre of his voice by putting it through a variably rotating Leslie speaker and by slowing down the tape speed of his recorded singing. More often than not, singing involves the cultivation of technique to a point where you could almost conceive of styles as diverse as opera, scatting, yodeling, and Tuvan throat singing as tantamount to introjected technology.
Which is true, but it also suggests that the voice is just like a violin or a Moog synthesizer: an apparatus for sound-generation. This combination of intimacy and artificiality is one of the things that makes singing compelling and more than a little eerie: The singer squeezes breath from the moist, abject depths of their physical interior to create sound-shapes that seem transcendent and immaterial. Singing is self-overcoming, pushing against the limits of the body, forcing air into friction with the throat, tongue, and lips in exquisitely controlled and contrived ways.
That applies as much to the history of pop, for all its down-to-earth aspirations and vernacular aura. The next logical step would then be to simply resort to external assistance. Another commonly heard accusation mounted against Auto-Tune is that it depersonalizes, eradicating the individuality and character of voices.
This is the very aspect of the voice—its carnal thickness—that differentiates one from another. But pitch-correction technology really messes with the voice as substance and signature.
Given that this embodied quality, as opposed to the learned dramatic arts of singing expressively, is a big part of why one voice turns us on and another leaves us cold, surely anything that diminishes them is a reduction? Maybe, and yet it is still possible to identify our favorite singers or rappers through the depersonalizing medium of pitch-correction—and to form a bond with new performers.
In fact, you could argue that Auto-Tune, by becoming an industry standard, creates even more premium on the other elements that make up vocal appeal—phrasing, personality—as well as extra-musical aspects like image and biography. Take the example of Kesha. She found ways to use Auto-Tune and other voice-production tricks to dramatize herself on the radio as a sort of human cartoon.
Actually, it refocused what talent in pop is. Auto-Tune means that these attributes—less to do with training or technique than personality or presence—become even more important. Hitting the right notes has never been that important when it comes to having a hit. Related to the complaints about falseness and impersonality is the accusation that Auto-Tune, especially in its overtly robotic-sounding uses, lacks soul. But you could argue the absolute reverse: that the sound of Auto-Tune is hyper-soul, a melodrama of micro-engineered melisma.
The end result is like froyo: already clotted with artificial flavours, then covered in gaudy toppings. Finally, people have claimed that Auto-Tune irrevocably dates recordings, thereby eliminating their chances for timelessness. The counter-argument is to simply point at phases of dated-but-good scattered all through music history, where the hallmarks of period stylization and recording studio fads have an enduring appeal partly for their intrinsic attributes but also for their very fixed-in-time quality.
Fuzztone and wah-wah guitar effects, then, cease to be heard as what they originally were innovative, technological, artificial, futuristic and seem authentic and time-honored, the golden olden way of doing things. In the s, though, some figures from the alternative rock world were sharp enough to think past rockism and realize there was something fresh and timely about Auto-Tune—that here was a potential field of artistic action. Radiohead were one of the first, appropriately during the sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac , their own intensive project of self-deconditioning from the rockist mindset.
She took a vocal melody and made it jump up and down in random leaps of three or four notes. Anti-rockist to the core remember their manifesto about never being photographed or appearing on stage in T-shirts? His work as Bon Iver had been synonymous with soul-bared intimacy and folky honesty. All these moves by alt-rock figures were examples of sonic slumming: highbrows flirting with the lowbrow and thereby bucking the consensus of the middlebrow , burnishing their cred by the counter-intuitive gambit of venturing into the commercial and gimmicky world of mainstream pop.
Along with its hyper-gloss allure, Auto-Tune may also resonate as a signifier of ultra-modernity: globalization as an aspirational aim, rather than an imposed hegemony to be resisted. For critics on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, this kind of standardization—popular music regimented around a Western idea of proper pitch—would be reason enough to abhor Auto-Tune. Read More. Thus was born the "Cher effect", and one of the biggest hits of the s.
More Videos The inventor of Auto-Tune sings out From oil to records. How does one invent Auto-Tune? By analyzing seismic data while looking for oil, of course.
That's Hildebrand's previous job: "Oil companies would detonate charges in the ground or in the water, and then they have sensors analyze the reflections to spot the oil," he explains.
That technology was bought by American oil giant Halliburton in and it's helped internal production in the U. It took him just a month to create it. They would do takes and then patch them together to make one piece of music that sounded in tune. Auto-Tune does all that at the push of a button. In , Antares invented an innovative plug-in, the Antares Microphone Modeler that allowed one microphone to imitate the sound of a wide variety of other microphones.
A hardware version of the Modeler, the AMM-1 was released a year later. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.
Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. When applied to audio recording, the model can also detect sonic pitch as well. Spring Auto-Tune is officially released as software, and quickly spreads as an essential tool for studios throughout Los Angeles and beyond.
But Madonna — no. She liked it immediately. People are often afraid of things that sound new.
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