Has Autotune really ruined music?
Auto-tune is a piece of pitch correction software which
was created by Antares Audio Technologies since 1990, but now the word “auto-tune” is
widely used to refer to any technology who can correct off-key vocals.
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| The Autotune plug-in for GarageBand |
Auto-tune has come to popularity since 1998. It began with
a hit called “Believe” by the American singer Cher. After the success of "Believe" the technique became known as the "Cher Effect".
Music video by Cher performing Believe. Notice that especially in 0:43, her voice begins to sound like a robot.
Intended, in the first
place, to correct off-key vocals, many artists, especially pop singers have later
found it interesting to create new music styles, like T-Pain, Lil Wayne and
Kanye West. T-Pain even released an iPhone application called "I Am T-Pain" to let common people Autotune their singing voices.
Music video by T-Pain feat. B.o.B performing Up Down (Do This All Day), featuring a very typical T-Pain-Style autotuned voice.
Audio by T-Pain performing
Autotune is not just used in studio albums, but can also be used real-time in concerts. They are also not just meant for human vocals, but can be applied to musical instruments like guitars.
Autotune has become today an essential tool for today's Pop music industry. Although some of them won't admit, but "Everybody uses it.", every sound studio is equipped with it.
What's really amazing with Autotune is not how it works, but why people hate it so much, since after all, it's just one of a thousand technologies applied in the music industry today. So I did some research, and I listed some major reasons:
- People think that autotuned singers are making money by cheating. Although I personally disagree completely, but many people still think that singer is someone who sings on pitch. So a singer who sells an autotuned record will be judged as cheating, or doesn't have an integrity as a person.
- People feel that they've been robbed of an authentic show. In fact, contrary to traditional sound effects like reverb, chorus and delay, Autotune is something that doesn't exist at all in nature. So people who think a concert should be "real" get angry about Autotune. This is very similar to people's reaction of lip-synching, both don't deliver "real" vocals in a show.
- A singer's singing ability is challenged if people found out that he/she uses Autotune.
So if people are all hating Autotune, why artists are still using it?
Before Autotune, a singer usually needs to sing hundreds of takes just to get all his notes right, but after a hundred times, his passion has already faded out. So it is important to capture that one emotionally perfect performance since this might be once in human history. And we can fix the pitch mistakes in it later.After all, singing is not just about pitch. It's about the style, about the personality, the emotion, the natural quality of voice, and many other things. Beyoncé is about being a strong, beautiful woman; Britney Spears is about being sexy; Taylor Swift is about being a beautiful-minded country girl; Lady GaGa is about being avant-garde; James Blunt is about being vulnerably-beautiful. And Selena Gomez may sing totally on pitch but remains a cracky, non-characteristic voice; and this guy may autotuned his voice but remains a garage singer:
Joe Bosso testing Autotune
Reference:
Seduced by ‘perfect’ pitch: how Auto-Tune conquered pop musich-how-auto-tune-conquered-pop-music
