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The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune
theodp writes "For a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound better than great — they're note- and pitch-perfect. It's all thanks to Auto-Tune, the brainchild of Andy Hildebrand, who realized that the wonders of autocorrelation — which he once used to map drilling sites for the oil industry — could also be used to bestow perfect pitch upon the Britney Spears of the world. While Auto-Tune was intended to be used unnoticed, musicians are growing fond of adjusting the program's retune speed to eliminate the natural transition between notes, which yield jumpy and automated-sounding vocals. 'I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,' says Hildebrand."
As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.
Chris Cornell uses this for the end of "I Am The Highway" (i think that's the name). That's what their talking about when referring to using it in unusual, unanticipated ways.
put the what in the where?
I have a harmonizer that I bought back before this guy supposedly invented this process, which does pitch correction in realtime, and can definitely be used live.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It's already here, and it sucks. Give a listen to Billy Joel's singing of the national anthem at the super bowl.
That performance would have undoubtedly been better without auto-tune.
The disclaimer on their early albums wasn't because they felt synths to be artificial or 'unmusical' or even 'cheating'. As you rightly point out - they used synths a lot in the '80s.
It was because they, together with their producer Roy Thomas Baker, created a wall of sound using ONLY guitars and vocals as the source. They wanted people to know that these eerily perfect sounds weren't coming out of a vocoder or synthesizer - that they hadn't taken any shortcuts.
Squirrel!
There was a very exciting interview on CBC Radio last year about various artists who do or don't use pitch control software and why they do or don't.
The expert being interviewed pointed out that of all the singers analyzed, Bob Dylan has nearly perfect pitch. You may not like the tone of his voice, but his pitch is spot-on.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
>One day I'd like to see a collection of music charts sorted by author rather than by performer and see if there are any interesting patterns...
You'd see Linda Perry all over the place, for one thing.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.