Slashdot Mirror
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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502766_pf.html
Amen. I'm not saying that McCain would have had much more success fixing the economy which Democrats like Barney Frank deliberately ruined so that they could pin it on Republicans and win sweeping victories in 2008, but there sure were a bunch of naive idiots who thought that they were voting for some kind of black messiah. Now look at your messiah, jackasses. Using the same fear tactics as his predecessor to ram through ruinous legislation. How does that crow taste, motherfuckers?
I felt the parent already made that point, but of course you are right - the better the technique, the greater the range of interpretation. Put differently, ones technique is just a means to an end, with the end being the interpretation.