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.
This is the worst live use of Autotune ever.
In 2007, Billy Joel sang the National Anthem with live autotune with all the wrong settings, and his voice got modulated like crazy. Sounds TERRIBLE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bcT_YOszxs&feature=related
How is this news? This has been going on for MANY years. The first example that came to mind is 11 years old, and I'm sure this is not the oldest.