How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music
An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher's "Believe" to Kanye West to Migos
It happened exactly 36 seconds into the song—a glimpse of the shape of pop to come, a feel of the fabric of the future we now inhabit. The phrase "I can't break through" turned crystalline, like the singer suddenly disappeared behind frosted glass. That sparkly special effect reappeared in the next verse, but this time a robotic warble wobbled, "So sa-a-a-ad that you're leaving."
The song, of course, was Cher's "Believe," a worldwide smash on its October 1998 release. And what we were really "leaving" was the 20th century.
The pitch-correction technology Auto-Tune had been on the market for about a year before "Believe" hit the charts, but its previous appearances had been discreet, as its makers, Antares Audio Technologies, intended. "Believe" was the first record where the effect drew attention to itself: The glow-and-flutter of Cher's voice at key points in the song announced its own technological artifice—a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal for the vague religiosity of the chorus, "Do you believe in life after love?"
The song's producers, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, tried to keep secret the source of their magic trick, even coming up with a cover story that identified the machine as a brand of vocoder pedal, that robotic-sounding analog-era effect widely used in disco and funk. But the truth seeped out. Soon overtly Auto-Tuned vocals were cropping up all over the sonic landscape, in R&B and dancehall, pop, house, and even country.
Right from the start, it always felt like a gimmick, something forever on the brink of falling from public favor. But Auto-Tune proved to be the fad that just wouldn't fade. Its use is now more entrenched than ever. Despite all the premature expectations of its imminent demise, Auto-Tune's potential as a creative tool turned out to be wider and wilder than anybody could ever have dreamt back when "Believe" topped the charts in 23 countries.
One recent measure of its triumph is Beyoncé and Jay-Z's "Apeshit." Here Queen Bey jumps on the trap bandwagon, tracing over verses written by Migos' Quavo and Offset through the crinkled sheen of over-cranked Auto-Tune. Some might take "Apeshit" as yet another example of Beyoncé's Midas-touch mastery, but really it was a transparent attempt to compete on urban radio by adopting the prevailing template of commercial-yet-street rap. Jay-Z certainly doesn't sound overjoyed about being surrounded on all sides by the effect, having proclaimed the "death of Auto-Tune" a decade ago.
What follows is the story of the life of Auto-Tune—its unexpected staying power, its global penetration, its freakily persistent power to thrill listeners. Few innovations in sound-production have been simultaneously so reviled and so revolutionary. Epoch-defining or epoch-defacing, Auto-Tune is indisputably the sound of the 21st century so far. Its imprint is the date-stamp that detractors claim will make recordings from this era sound dated. But it seems far more likely to become a trigger for fond nostalgia: how we'll remember these strange times we're living through.
Where the future is still what it used to be – Antares Audio Technology marketing slogan
Long before inventing Auto-Tune, the mathematician Dr. Andy Hildebrand made his first fortune helping the oil giant Exxon find drilling sites. Using fabulously complex algorithms to interpret the data generated by sonar, his company located likely deposits of fuel deep underground. Alongside math, though, Hildebrand's other passion was music; he's an accomplished flute player who funded his college tuition by teaching the instrument. In 1989, he left behind the lucrative field of "reflection seismology" to launch Antares Audio Technology, despite not being entirely certain what exactly the company would be researching and developing.
The seed of the technology that would make Hildebrand famous came during a lunch with colleagues in the field: When he asked the assembled company what needed to be invented, someone jokingly suggested a machine that would enable her to sing in tune. The idea lodged in his brain. Hildebrand realized that the same math that he'd used to map the geological subsurface could be applied to pitch-correction.
The expressed goal of Antares at that time was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. "When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost," the original patent asserted sweepingly—seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where "wrong" has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, as it were—to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion.
And that is exactly how Auto-Tune has worked in the preponderance of its usage: Some speculate that it features in 99 percent of today's pop music. Available as stand-alone hardware but more commonly used as a plug-in for digital audio workstations, Auto-Tune turned out—like so many new pieces of music technology—to have unexpected capacities. In addition to selecting the key of the performance, the user must also set the "retune" speed, which governs the slowness or fastness with which a note identified as off-key gets pushed towards the correct pitch. Singers slide between notes, so for a natural feel—what Antares assumed producers would always be seeking—there needed to be a gradual (we're talking milliseconds here) transition. As Hildebrand recalled in one interview, "When a song is slower, like a ballad, the notes are long, and the pitch needs to shift slowly. For faster songs, the notes are short, the pitch needs to be changed quickly. I built in a dial where you could adjust the speed from 1 (fastest) to 10 (slowest). Just for kicks, I put a 'zero' setting, which changed the pitch the exact moment it received the signal."
It was the fastest settings—and that instant-switch "zero"—that gave birth to the effect first heard on "Believe" and which has subsequently flourished in myriad varieties of brittle, glittering distortion. Technically known as "pitch quantization"—a relative of rhythmic quantization, which can regularize grooves or, conversely, make them more swinging—the "classic" Auto-Tune effect smooths out the minuscule variations in pitch that occur in singing. At the speediest retune settings, the gradual transitions between notes that a flesh-and-blood vocalist makes are eliminated. Instead, each and every note is pegged to an exact pitch, fluctuations are stripped out, and Auto-Tune forces instant jumps between notes. The result is that sound we know so well: an intimate stranger hailing from the uncanny valley between organic and synthetic, human and superhuman. A voice born of the body but becoming pure information.
Over the ensuing years, Antares have refined and expanded what Auto-Tune can do, while also creating a range of related voice-processing plug-ins. Most of the new features have been in line with the original intent: repairing flawed vocals in a way that sounds naturalistic and is relatively inconspicuous on recordings. Hence functions like "Humanize," which preserves the "small variations in pitch" in a sustained note, and "Flex-Tune," which retains an element of human error. Some of Auto-Tune's sister products add "warmth" to vocals, increase "presence," intensify breathiness. The freaky-sounding Throat EVO maps the vocal tract as a physical structure, just like Hildebrand mapping the oil fields miles underground. This phantasmal throat can be elongated or otherwise modified (you can adjust the position and width of vocal cords, mouth, and lips too), allowing the user to "literally design your own new vocal sound," according to the Antares website.
But as the more overtly artificial uses of Auto-Tune became a craze that never ran out of steam, Antares soon stepped in with anti-naturalistic software like Mutator EVO. Described as an "extreme voice designer," Mutator enables the user to sculpt a voice and either "mangle" it "into a variety of strange creatures" or "alienize" it, shredding the vocal into tiny slivers, stretching or compressing the length of those snippets, playing them in reverse, and so forth—ultimately creating your own unique version of an alien language.
All of this is Antares supplying a demand that it had never originally imagined would exist. The real impetus came, as always, from below: performers, producers, engineers, and beyond them, the marketplace of popular desire. If the general populace had uniformly recoiled from the Cher effect, or from its recurrence half-decade later as the T-Pain effect, if Lil Wayne and Kanye West had reacted like Jay-Z and spurned the effect rather than embraced it as a creative tool, it's unlikely that Antares would be catering to the appetite for vocal distortion and estrangement.
The crucial shift with Auto-Tune came when artists started to use it as a real-time process, rather than as a fix-it-it-in-the-mix application after the event. Singing or rapping in the booth, listening to their own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones, they learned how to push the effect. Some engineers will record the vocal so that there is a "raw" version to be fixed up later, but—increasingly in rap—there is no uncooked original to work from. The true voice, the definitive performance, is Auto-Tuned right from the start.
Rap of the 2010s is where that process has played out most glaringly and compellingly: MCs like Future, Chief Keef, and Quavo are almost literally cyborgs, inseparable from the vocal prosthetics that serve as their bionic superpowers. But we can also hear the long-term influence of Auto-Tune on singing styles on Top 40 radio. Vocalists have learned to bend with the effect, exploiting the supersmooth sheen it lends to long sustained notes, and intuitively singing slightly flat because that triggers over-correction in Auto-Tune pleasingly. In a feedback loop, there are even examples of singers, like YouTube mini-sensation Emma Robinson, who've learned to imitate Auto-Tune and generate the "artifacts" that the plug-in produces when used in deliberately unsubtle ways entirely naturally from their own vocal tracts.
Rihanna is the dominant singer of our era, in no small part because the Barbados grain of her voice interacts well with Auto-Tune's nasal tinge, making for a sort of fire-and-ice combination. Voice effects have been prominent in many of her biggest hits, from the "eh-eh-eh-eh-eh" pitch descents in "Umbrella" to the melodious twinkle-chime of the chorus in "Diamonds." Then there's Katy Perry, whose voice is so lacking in textural width that Auto-Tune turns it into a stiletto of stridency that—on songs like "Firework" and "Part of Me"—seems to pierce deep into the listener's ear canal.
Just like Hoover with the vacuum cleaner or Kleenex with tissues, Auto-Tune has become the stand-in for a whole range of pitch-correction and vocal-processing equipment. The best known of these rivals, Melodyne, is preferred by many recording studio professionals for the greater scope it offers for intricately altering vocals.
Before you even get into the technicalities of its process and user interface, the difference between the two devices comes over in the names. Auto-Tune sounds like a machine or a company providing a service (car repair, even!). But Melodyne could be the name of a girl or an Ancient Greek goddess; perhaps the brand name of a medicine or the street name of a psychoactive drug. Even the name of the company that makes Melodyne sounds slightly mystical and hippy-dippy: Celemony. Where Auto-Tune's Dr. Hildebrand worked for the oil industry, Melodyne inventor Peter Neubäcker apprenticed with a maker of stringed instruments and combined a passion for hardcore math and computing with a fascination for alchemy and astrology.
Launched on the music technology market in early 2001, Melodyne was always conceived as an apparatus for total design of vocal performances, working not just on pitch adjustment but modifications to timing and phrasing. The program captures the characteristics of a vocal or instrumental performance and displays them graphically, with each note appearing as what Celemony calls a "blob." Sound becomes Play-Doh to be sculpted or tinted by a huge range of effects. The blobs can be stretched or squished by dragging the cursor. Internal fluctuations within a blob can be smoothed out or added, creating, say, vibrato that didn't exist in the original performance. As for timing, a note-blob can be separated more cleanly from a preceding or following blob—or conversely, pushed closer—to create effects of syncopation, stress, or sharper attack. The entire feel of a rapper's flow or a singer's phrasing can be radically re-articulated. Emotion itself becomes raw material to be edited.
"Keeping it real-ish" seems to be the presiding ethos of Melodyne, and certainly something that its users prize and see as the edge it has over Auto-Tune. "My goal is natural-sounding vocals," says Chris "TEK" O'Ryan, an in-demand vocal producer whose clientele includes Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Mary J. Blige. "It's like a good CGI monster—you don't want it to look fake." O'Ryan uses Auto-Tune in the recording studio as well, but only so that he and the artist don't get distracted by striving to achieve a pitch-perfect take and can concentrate on delivery, timing, groove, and character. The real work, though, comes later, when he removes the Auto-Tune and sculpts the vocal "by hand" using Melodyne. "I'll add trills, I'll emphasize attacks or the scoop up to a moment in a performance," O'Ryan says. At the extreme, the recording of the singer might take three or four hours, and then he'll spend two to four days working it over in Melodyne, on his own.
This sounds like a highly significant contribution, and O'Ryan doesn't flinch when it's suggested that in a sense he's the co-creator of these vocal performances, a sort of invisible but vital element of what you hear on the radio or through Spotify. But he emphasizes that "I'm embellishing—hearing what they doing in the booth and following their lead." He also stresses that the end goal must not sound overworked. Indeed one of the reasons why both Auto-Tune and Melodyne have become so indispensable in studios is that they allow performers and producers to concentrate on the expressive and characterful qualities in a vocal, rather than get bent out of shape pursuing a perfectly in-tune take. They are labor-saving devices to a large degree, especially for big stars who face so many other demands on their time.
Still, there's no doubt that there is something magical verging on sorcerous about what Melodyne, Auto-Tune, and similar technologies enable. A shiver ran through me when I watched one Melodyne tutorial on YouTube about "advanced comping"—Celemony's radical extension of long established studio techniques of compiling fragments from different vocal takes into an uber-performance. Comping started back in the analog era, with producers painstakingly stitching the best lines of singing from multiple renditions into a superior final performance that never actually occurred as a single event. But Melodyne can take the expressive qualities of one take (or fraction thereof) by mapping its characteristics and pasting those attributes into an alternative take that is preferable for other reasons. As the Celemony tutorial puts it, the newly created blob "inherits the intonation" of the first but also the timing of the second take. And that's just one example of Melodyne superpowers: It can also work with polyphonic material, shifting a note within, say, a guitar chord, and it can change the timbre and harmonics of a voice to the point of altering its apparent gender.
Chances are that any vocal you hear on the radio today is a complex artifact that's been subjected to an overlapping array of processes. Think of it as similar to the hair on a pop star's head, which has probably been dyed, then cut and layered, then plastered with grooming products, and possibly had extensions woven into it. The result might have a natural feel to it, even a stylized disorder, but it is an intensely cultivated and sculpted assemblage. The same goes for the singing we hear on records. But because at some deep level we still respond to the voice in terms of intimacy and honesty—as an outpouring of the naked self—we don't really like to think of it as being doctored and denatured as a neon green wig.
In the same way that pop has seen the rise of specialist producers whose sole activity is capturing vocal performances and remodeling them in post-production, in hip-hop today there are name engineers whose main job is working with rappers—figures like the late Seth Firkins, who worked with Future, and Alex Tumay, Young Thug's engineer. Here, though, the emphasis is on real-time synergy between the rapper and the technician, who drags-and-drops plug-ins and effects as the recording process unfolds. This edge-of-chaos approach recalls the way that legendary dub producers of the 1970s used to mix live, hunched over a mixing board and swathed in a cloud of weed smoke, moving sliders up or down and triggering reverb and other sound effects.
Oddly, the very first example of rapping through Auto-Tune seems to have occurred in "Too Much of Heaven" by the Euro-pop group Eiffel 65, way back in 2000. But the love affair between hip-hop and Hildebrand's invention really started with T-Pain, although he actually abandoned rapping for Auto-Tune enhanced singing in the mid-2000s. For several years, he was the Zelig of rap&B, scoring a string of hits himself and popping up in songs by Flo Rida, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Rick Ross, to name just a few. Rappers seemed to relate to him warmly, embracing him like their era's very own Roger Troutman, the talk box boosted lover man of 1980s funk band Zapp. When Snoop Dogg put out his own T-Pain-like single, "Sexual Eruption," in 2007, the video explicitly harked back to Zapp circa 1986's "Computer Love": that same combo of sterile futuristic slickness and slinky funk sexiness.
As if by associational drift, the first rappers to really make something artistic out of Auto-Tune seemed to pick up on the word "pain" in T-Pain (as opposed to his generally upbeat music). Something about the sound of Auto-Tune melted these rappers' hard hearts and opened up the possibility for tenderness and vulnerability: Lil Wayne's gooey ballad "How to Love," or his emo romp "Knockout," or his sensitive (despite its title) "Prostitute Flange" and its tidied-up remake, "Prostitute 2," on which Wayne's asthmatic croaks sound like his larynx is coated with writhing fluorescent nodes. As for Kanye West's 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak, T-Pain claimed not only to have influenced the rapper's resort to Auto-Tune but to have inspired the album title. In time, T-Pain would complain that 808s and Heartbreak received the critical praise that his debut album, Rappa Ternt Sanga, should have got four years earlier. He also griped that Kanye didn't even use the effect properly, adding it on later rather than singing with the effect live in the studio.
Correctly done or not, West's first notable foray into Auto-Tune was a guest verse in Young Jeezy's "Put On" in the summer of 2008—very much a dry (or weepy-moist) run for Heartbreak in so far as he waxed maudlin about the loss of his adored mother and his own feelings of being lost in Fame's hall-of-mirrors maze. Then came the full-blown album, described by its creator as therapy for his "lonely at the top" life—an artistically-sublimated substitute for suicide, even. The album's sound, West declared at the time, was "Auto-Tune meets distortion, with a bit of delay on it and a whole bunch of fucked-up life." Auto-Tune enabled a shaky singer to move into an R&B zone not really heard on his earlier albums. But the abrasive Auto-Tune treatments that shaped the entire album—like the wracked shivers shot through "how could you be so" in "Heartless," the aural equivalent of a trembling lip or twitching eyelid—were also attempts to forge new sonic signifiers for age-old emotions of anguish and abandonment.
Arguably, there was an even more radical late 2000s album that collided vocal-mangling effects with themes of pop stardom as disorientation and ego-disintegration: Britney Spears' Blackout. Britney's careening-out-of-control career was re-presented to the public as porno-pop, a self-referential spectacle that implicated listeners in their own voyeurism and schadenfreude. Drastically pitch-tweaked to form an angular melody, the chorus of "Piece of Me" invited listeners to hear it as "you wanna piece of meat?" The rhythm tracks on "Gimme More" and "Freakshow" sounded like they were made out of gasps and shudders of pained ecstasy or ecstatic pain. (T-Pain popped up as co-writer and background vocalist on "Hot as Ice.") Britney's trademark husky croak survived on Blackout, but on later albums and hits like 2011's "Till the World Ends," her vocals got less distinctive as pitch-correction took hold. She began to blend into a Top 40 landscape dominated by Auto-Tune as default universal, a glacé glisten coating every voice on the radio.
"Boom Boom Pow," Black Eyed Peas' smash single of 2009, was at once typical and exemplary as pop fare at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Every vocal in the track is Auto-Tuned to the max. will.i.am could have been hymning Antares Audio when he boasted of having "that future flow, that digital spit." But the Peas were peddling a frozen futurity, ideas about how tomorrow will sound and look and dress established a decade earlier in Hype Williams' videos and in films like The Matrix. Perhaps earlier still: The "Boom Boom Pow" promo was meant to be set a thousand years from today but really looked like a pastiche of ideas from 1982's Tron. Amidst this bonanza of retro-future clichés, Auto-Tune felt less like the true sound of the new millennium, and more like a marginal twist on the vocoder—by the late 2000s, a decidedly nostalgic sound.
In 2009, the first big backlash against the omnipresence of Auto-Tune kicked off. On "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)," Jay-Z accused his hip-hop contemporaries of going pop and soft: "Y'all n****s singing too much/Get back to rap, you T-Pain-ing too much." Defining himself as a bastion of pure lyricism, he declared a "moment of silence" for Auto-Tune, a machine made obsolete through overuse. That same year, Death Cab for Cutie turned up to the Grammy Awards sporting blue ribbons that obliquely symbolized the eroded humanity of music-making, via jazz's blue notes. "Over the last 10 years we've seen a lot of good musicians being affected by this newfound digital manipulation of the human voice, and we feel enough is enough," declared frontman Ben Gibbard. "Let's really try to get music back to its roots of actual people singing and sounding like human beings." Guitar-maker Paul Reed Smith upbraided Dr. Hildebrand in person, accusing him of having "completely destroyed Western music." In May 2010, Time magazine listed Auto-Tune among the 50 worst inventions of the modern era, alongside subprime mortgages, DDT, crocs, Olestra, pop-up ads, and New Coke.
Even T-Pain spoke up, trying to pull off a tricky juggling act—claiming pioneer status and preeminence in the field while simultaneously criticizing recent exponents for not knowing how to get the best results out of the technology. He claimed that he'd spent two years researching Auto-Tune and thinking about it—including actually meeting with Hildebrand—before he even attempted to use it. "A lot of math went into that shit," he said. "It would take us a fucking billion minutes to explain to regular motherfuckers. But I really studied this shit... I know why it catches certain notes and why it doesn't catch certain notes."
The backlash kept on coming. Despite having used Auto-Tune and other vocal treatments on ecstatic tunes like "One More Time" and "Digital Love" off 2001's Discovery, Daft Punk staged a back-to-analog recantation with 2013's Random Access Memories: In interviews, Thomas Bangalter exalted live musicianship and complained that Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and other digital platforms had "created a musical landscape that is very uniform."
Even Lady Gaga, the queen of all things plastic-fantastical, tried the "this is the real me" switch with 2016's "Perfect Illusion," which drastically reduced the Auto-Tune levels on her singing and saw her adopting a dressed-down, cut-off jeans and plain T-shirt look for the video. "I believe many of us are wondering why there are so many fake things around us," Gaga said. "How do we look through these images that we know are filtered and altered, and decipher what is reality and what is a perfect illusion? ... This song is about raging against it and letting it go. It's about wanting people to re-establish that human connection."
Much of this anti-Auto-Tune sentiment presented the idea that the technology is a dehumanizing deception foisted upon the public. Attempting to deflect this angle of attack, Hildebrand once offered an analogy with a generally accepted form of everyday artifice, asking, "My wife wears makeup, does that make her evil?" Perhaps because of Cher's involvement in Auto-Tune's debut on the world pop stage, critics have often connected pitch-correction and cosmetic surgery, comparing the effect to Botox, face peels, collagen injections, and the rest. In the video for "Believe," Cher actually looks how Auto-Tune sounds. 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. If the "Believe" promo was produced today, a fourth level of falsification would be routinely applied: digital post production procedures like motion-retouching or colorizing that operate at the level of pixels rather than pores, fundamentally altering the integrity of the image.
This is exactly the same business that Auto-Tune and Melodyne are in. The taste for these effects and the revulsion against them are part of the same syndrome, reflecting a deeply conflicted confusion in our desires: simultaneously craving the real and the true while continuing to be seduced by digital's perfection and the facility and flexibility of use it offers. That's why young hipsters buy overpriced vinyl for the aura of authenticity and analog warmth but—in practice—use the download codes to listen to the music on an everyday level.
But has there ever really been such a thing as "natural" singing, at least since the invention of recording, microphones, and live amplification? Right at the primal roots of rock'n'roll, Elvis Presley's voice came clad in slapback echo. 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.
Reverb, EQ, phasing, stacking vocals, comping the best takes to create a superhuman pseudo-event that never happened as a real-time performance—all of these increasingly standard studio techniques tampered with the integrity of what reached the listener's ears. And that's before we even get to the digital era, with its vastly expanded palette of modifications. It could be further argued that all recording is intrinsically artificial, that the simple act of "canning" the voice in a preserved form to be reactivated at will in places and times remote from the original site of performance goes against nature, or at least breaks drastically with the thousands of years when human beings had to be in the presence of music-makers to hear the sounds they made. If you go back just a little way, you invariably find that the very sounds or qualities that the likes of Death Cab for Cutie prize as "warm" or "real"—like fuzz-tone guitar, or Hammond organ—were considered newfangled contrivances and lamentable depletions of the human touch.
In a profound sense, there is nothing necessarily "natural" about the unadorned and unamplified human voice. 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.
"Voice is the original instrument," according to the avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara. 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. "Falsetto," that staple of so much pop music, from doo-wop to disco to today's R&B, contains the idea of fakeness in its very name. The next logical step would then be to simply resort to external assistance. Which is why, when you listen to the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons or Queen you almost hear them reaching towards an Auto-Tune sound.
Another commonly heard accusation mounted against Auto-Tune is that it depersonalizes, eradicating the individuality and character of voices. In their natural mode, vocal cords don't produce a clear signal: there's "noise" mixed in there, the grit and grain that is a physical residue of the process of speaking or singing. This is the very aspect of the voice—its carnal thickness—that differentiates one from another. Digital transmission can interfere with that anyway, especially at the lower bandwidths—it's why, say, if you call your mom on her cellphone from your cellphone, she can sound unlike herself to an unsettling degree. 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. It's hard now to listen to her early hits without hearing them as documents of abuse, in light of her ongoing legal battles with producer Dr. Luke, but 2009's breakout smash single "Tik ToK" is a case study in how to push personality through a depersonalizing technology: the deliciously impish gurgle that wracks the line "I ain't comin' back," the word "tipsy" slowing down like someone about to pass out, the screwed deceleration of the line "shut us down" when the police pull the plug on the party. The sheer gimmickry of these effects suited Kesha's image as a trashed 'n' trashy party girl, mirroring her love of glitter as a form of cheap glamour.
These and other examples also lay waste to the related argument that pitch-correction is a deskilling innovation that allows the talent-free—performers who can't sing in tune without help—to make it. Actually, it refocused what talent in pop is. The history of popular music is full of super-professional session singers and backing vocalists who could sing pitch-perfect at the drop of a mic, but for whatever reason, never made it as frontline stars—they lacked a certain characterful quality to the voice or just couldn't command the spotlight. 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. Sometimes when I listen to Top 40 radio, I think, "This doesn't sound like how emotion feels." But it's not because it is less-than-human. It's because it's superhuman, the average song crammed with so many peaks and tremors. You could talk of an "emotional compression" equivalent to the maximalist audio compression that engineers and music fans complain about—a feelings equivalent to the loudness war, with Auto-Tune and Melodyne enlisted to supercharge the tremulousness levels, while the teams of writers involved in any given pop single squeeze in as many uplifting pre-chorus moments and soaring ecstasies as possible. The end result is like froyo: already clotted with artificial flavours, then covered in gaudy toppings.
Writing about the rise of sequencers, programmed rhythm, sample-loops and MIDI, the academic Andrew Goodwin argued that "we have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness." That maxim could be updated for the Auto-Tune/Melodyne era: "We have grown used to connecting machines and soulfulness." And that perhaps is the lingering mystery—the extent to which the general public has adapted to hearing overtly processed voices as the sound of lust, longing, and loneliness. In another meaning of "soul," we could also say that Auto-Tune is the sound of blackness today, at least in its most cutting-edge forms, like trap and future-leaning R&B.
Finally, people have claimed that Auto-Tune irrevocably dates recordings, thereby eliminating their chances for timelessness. In 2012, musician, sound engineer, and recording studio owner Steve Albini groused about the lingering legacy of "Believe," a "horrible piece of music with this ugly soon-to-be cliché" at its heart. He recalled his horror when certain friends he thought he knew opined that they kinda liked that Cher tune, likening the syndrome to zombification: "A terrible song that gives all your friends brain cancer and makes shit foam up out of their mouths." Concerning Auto-Tune's widespread use, Albini declared that "whoever has that done to their record, you just know that they are marking that record for obsolescence. They're gluing the record's feet to the floor of a certain era and making it so it will eventually be considered stupid."
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. The examples are legion: psychedelia, dub reggae, '80s electro with its Roland 808 bass and drum sounds, the short sample-memory loops and MPC-triggered stabs of early hip-hop and jungle. Even things that might have annoyed the typical alternative music fan at the time—like the gated drums on mainstream '80s pop-rock—have now acquired a certain charm. One wonders also how Albini can be so damn sure the records he's been involved in making have escaped the sonic markers of their epoch. At this point, whatever his intent, I'd bet that the high-profile records he produced for Pixies, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and Bush all fairly scream "late '80s/early '90s."
The Auto-Tune anti-stance expressed by Albini and countless others is rockism's standard operating procedure: naturalize the core aspects of the genre—distorted electric guitars, raw-throated roar, un-showbiz performance—and in the process elide the technological contrivance and inherent theatricality that were always already there. 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 2000s, 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. In 2001, Thom Yorke told me about how they used Hildebrand's invention on "Pakt Like Sardines" and "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors," both for the classic "dead in-pitch" robo-effect and to talk into the machine. "You give it a key and it desperately tries to search for the music in your speech and produces notes at random," Yorke explained.
In 2010, Grimes used Auto-Tune as a kind of writing tool for the song "Hallways," from her second album, Halfaxa. She took a vocal melody and made it jump up and down in random leaps of three or four notes. Then, using this as a guide vocal, she resang the herky-jerky Auto-Tuned melody in order to, as she once said, "put the emotion back into it." The following year, Kate Bush revisited her 1989 song "A Deeper Understanding," a prophetic parable of the alienated lifestyle of the approaching digital age, this time using Auto-Tune to make the Siri-like voice of the computer sound like a guardian angel offering surrogate solace and counterfeit company: "Hello, I know that you're unhappy/I bring you love and deeper understanding."
Anti-rockist to the core (remember their manifesto about never being photographed or appearing on stage in T-shirts?), Vampire Weekend were unsurprisingly early adopters—tweaking the effect full-strength on "California English" off of 2010's Contra. The previous year, Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij dedicated a whole side-project, Discovery, to diabetic-overdose levels of Auto-Tune super sweetness, including a tooth enamel corroding remake of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back." Less expected was Sufjan Stevens' "Impossible Soul," 26 minutes of deliriously fluttered singing in full Auto-Tune effect, from 2010's The Age of Adz.
Probably the most surprising indie embrace of pitch-correction was Justin Vernon's. His work as Bon Iver had been synonymous with soul-bared intimacy and folky honesty. But on "Woods" and the album 22, A Million, his music found the missing link between the Band's "Whispering Pines" and Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights." A twinklescape of multi-tracked, glassily-processed harmonies, "Woods" conjures an atmosphere of solitude and self-care, a retreat from the ceaseless stimulation of a wired and worry-making world: "I'm up in the woods/I'm down on my mind/I'm building a still to slow down the time." Kanye West loved the song so much that he borrowed its hook and chorus for his own "Lost in the World" and recruited Vernon to join him. West's lyric is more ambivalent, or confused: complaining about feeling "lost in this plastic life" but still being up for some empty hedonism. West and Vernon also appeared in 2016's "Friends" by Francis and the Lights, but here the vocal glisten came from a device called Prismizer. Around this time Bon Iver collaborated with James Blake, dubstep's prince of weepy and warped vocals, resulting in the extraordinary "Fall Creek Boys Choir"—imagine a choir of ketamine elves imitating Michael McDonald.
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. I use the word "slumming" advisedly, since disdain for Auto-Tune is a class reflex that can be indexed to similar attitudes that favor vintage aesthetics, weathered and distressed textures, the handmade and the antique, organic and locavore produce, and the whole realm of heritage and history itself. The further down the class spectrum you go, the more shiny and new things get, whether you're talking about clothes, furniture, or sound production. Auto-Tune correlates with a lower class attraction to man-made fabrics, spaceship sneakers, box-fresh clothes, and an interior décor aesthetic somewhere between Scarface and "MTV Cribs."
That's why Auto-Tune has been most fervently embraced in either the ethnic-majority urban zones of America and the West generally, and throughout the developing world: Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, India, et al. 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. Conservatives would mourn the erosion of tradition; Marxists would tend to focus on the rapacity of capitalism as it runs rampant across the world, with pop music simultaneously propagandizing for the Western way of life while also raking in revenue for its musical commodities and for its sound-shaping technology. But one of the surprising things about Auto-Tune is how it has been twisted by its non-Western users, intensifying musical differences rather than erasing them.
When it was first embraced by Western audiences in the '80s, African music tended to be associated with qualities like rootsy, earthy, authentic, natural—in other words, values fundamentally at odds with Auto-Tune. Actually, this was a mistaken—and dare I say, rockist—projection. Most early forms of Afro-pop, such as highlife or juju, were slick, the work of highly professional bands not averse to a little bit of razzle dazzle. There was nothing particular rural about this sound, which was to a large degree associated with an urbane, sophisticated, cosmopolitan audience. Nor was it particularly "pure" in the way that Western world music enthusiasts seemed to crave: It always eagerly incorporated ideas from black America, the Caribbean, and the outside world, from King Sunny Adé's Shadows-style twangy guitar, to the synths and drum machines in '80s Ethiopian electro-funk.
So it makes perfect sense that 21st century Afrobeat would embrace the latest in sonic modernity. At the same time, Auto-Tune exacerbates rather than erodes the pre-existing hallmarks of African pop, intensifying the sing-song melodies, the interplay of glinting guitar and chirruping bass, the lilting rhythms. Auto-Tuned singing—lead voice and backing harmonies, all treated to different degrees of pitch-correction—drapes the groove in criss-crossing patterns, like strands of maple syrup and honey drizzled across a pancake. The sweetness and lightness inherent to African music becomes dizzying, at times cloying to the point of nausea, like you've eaten a whole pack of chocolate chip cookies in a single sitting.
With Nigerian singers like Flavour and Tekno, Auto-Tune enhances the delicacy of the vocal delivery, making it even more dainty and shimmering, like a hummingbird dipping for nectar. On Flavour's "Sake of Love," every syllable of "Baby you're my ecstasy/You are my fantasy" is deliciously clipped and distinct. But Auto-Tune is also used to make Flavour sound hilariously delirious on "Alcohol," where each iteration of the title phrase gets more mush-mouthed, three syllables degenerating into a single-phoneme warble. "Ur Waist" by Iyanya, who won the TV singing contest "Project Fame West Africa" presumably without any technological assistance, bubbles over with pitch-perfected geysers of mystic bliss. Regarded by some as the craziest musician in Nigeria, Terry G's tunes are closer to dancehall: on tracks like "Free Madness Pt. 2" his raucous rasp rides the choppy hard-bounce of the beats, the Auto-Tuned-to-the-max voice ranging from a parched roar to a fizzy froth.
Head north from Nigeria and Ghana to Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt, and the Auto-Tune gets even more overdriven. As critic Jayce Clayton noted in his book Uproot, pitch-correction made a perfectly (un)natural interface with the existing traditions of vocal artifice in Arabic musical traditions, with its serpentine curlicues of melismatic ornaments. "Sliding pitches sound startling through it," Clayton wrote. "A weird electronic warble embeds itself in rich, throaty glissandos." Listen to Algerian raï or Egyptian popular song, and the often long tracks seem riven with electric streaks of ear-dazzling intensity, like cork-screwing bolts of lightning. If there is music that is more heavily Auto-Tuned than this on the planet, I'm not sure I'm ready for it.
In "Death of Auto-Tune," Jay-Z boasted, "My raps don't have melodies" and claimed that his music made people "wan' go commit felonies," even comparing the track to "assault with a deadly weapon." In other words, unlike all that pop-friendly rap with R&B choruses, this was the raw shit—uncompromising and street-real.
A decade on, in an ironic turnabout, it is hip-hop at its most melodious and "cooked" sounding that is the most hardcore in its themes. Trap is hard to define as a genre—even the trademark rapid-fire hi-hats are not always present in every track—but one widespread characteristic is the way that performers dissolve the boundary between rapping and singing. And that development owes a huge amount to Auto-Tune. To borrow a phrase from T-Pain, Auto-Tune turns rappers into singers—or something unclassifiably in-between. Accentuating the musicality already present in rhythmically cadenced speech, pitch-correction technology pushes rapping towards crooning, encouraging rappers to emit trills and melodic flourishes that would otherwise be outside their reach. Auto-Tune works as a kind of safety net for vocal acrobatics—or perhaps the equivalent of the harness and pulley-ropes that enable stage performers to fly.
"We're getting melodies that wouldn't exist without it," says Chris "TEK" O'Ryan. Listening to the Auto-Tuned and otherwise effected versions of themselves on headphones as they record in the studio, rappers like Quavo and Future have learned both how to push specific extreme effects and to work within this melodic rap interzone, exploiting the glistening sinuosity inherent to Auto-Tune. As Future's engineer and vocals specialist, the late Seth Firkins, once put it, "Because Auto-Tune pegs him to the right pitches, he can try any shit, and it'll still sound cool."
One legitimate complaint about Auto-Tune could be that it has stripped the blues element out of popular music—all those slightly off-pitch but expressive elements in singing—in favor of a remorseless flawlessness (which is why so much pop and rock today feels closer to the musical theater tradition than to rock'n'roll). But Future goes the opposite direction. He's reinvented blues for the 21 century, restoring it not just as a texture (raspy, rough-toned) or as a style of delivery (somewhere between speech and singing) but as a mode of feeling, an existential stance towards the world.
"My music—that's pain," Future has said. "I come from pain, so you gonna hear it in my music." He's talking here about his past, a childhood of poverty in the thick of the drug trade. But it equally describes his present, as captured in the disjointed stream of consciousness of his lyrics, which depict a treadmill grind of emotionless sex and numbing drugs, a lifestyle of triumphs and material splendor that feels strangely desolate. Take the extraordinary "All Right," off 2016's Purple Reign, on which Future rap-sings, "I got money, fame, I got mini-mes/I can feel the pain of my enemies/I been downin' Percosets with Hennessy/I can hear the hood sayin' they proud of me." It's not entirely clear if he's gloating about the jealousy of haters, as is the rap norm, or if he's so sensitized and tuned-in to external emotional vibrations that he really does feel the pain of those he's defeated. The "pride" that pops up repeatedly and dissonantly in the song's lyric (see also "gave her two Xans now she proud of me") speaks of an inside-out world where socially destructive and personally dissolute acts become glorious and heroic. But then, that's just like rock'n'roll isn't it—at least in the Stones/Led Zeppelin/Guns N' Roses sense.
Wielding Auto-Tune like this century's equivalent of the electric guitar, Future has explicitly differentiated his way of working from T-Pain's, saying that, "I used it to rap because it makes my voice sound grittier." According to his late engineer Firkins, the Auto-Tune was always on, from the start of any Future session, because "that's how we get the emotion out of him." The performer and the technical interface merge into a synergy system, a feedback circuit. Over the course of his vast discography of mixtapes and studio albums, Future has learned how to work the technology, conjuring the cold-inside shivers that run through the marrow of the hook in "Wicked," the chirruping gasps of self-rapture in "I'm So Groovy," the ecstasy of triumph, abandon, and carelessness in "Fuck Up Some Commas," and the groggy whimper of "Codeine Crazy," where his voice seems to fizz like the syrup mixing with the Sprite. Four of the most potent sonic statements of this current decade, these songs couldn't have existed without Hildebrand's invention. With Future, a technology designed to glaze over deficient performances with posthuman precision has become a rehumanizing noise-generator, a distortion device to better reflect the aching mess of dirty souls.
Paradoxically, Auto-Tune's most flagrantly artificial effects have come to signify authenticity at its most raw and exposed. "I was going to lie to you but I had to tell the truth," as Future put it on "Honest." Oddly, yet logically, Auto-Tune parallels the effects of the prescription meds that Future abuses so prodigiously. Just as the painkillers and anxiety-deadeners seem to simultaneously numb him and unloose him emotionally, Auto-Tune works in Future's music as a mask-on/mask-off device—at once shielding and revealing. Through the "lie" of its distancing mechanism, Future can tell the truth.
As Future's own drug-soaked output testifies,Auto-Tune isn't just the fad that won't fade, it's become the sound of being faded. Auto-Tune and other forms of vocal effecting are the primary color in the audio palette of a new psychedelia. Appropriately for these dispiriting and despiritualized times, it's a hollowed-out and decadent update, oriented around razing rather than raising consciousness. Trap and its local subsets like Chicago drill represent a kind of debased transcendence: struggle and sleaze gilded through the prismatic perceptions generated by a polydrug diet of prescription downers, codeine-laced cough syrup, weed, MDMA, and alcohol.
Which is one reason why Chief Keef comes over on his recordings like some strange composite of mystic and monster, saint and savage: He sounds serenely detached even as he's rapping about putting silencers on guns and thotties riding him like a Harley. Keef's goblin glint of a voice drones deadpan from amid beats whose synth-orchestrations and tinkling bell-sounds resemble Christmas trees draped in fairy lights. On tracks like "Know She Does" and "On the Corner" off 2015's astonishing Almighty DP mixtape, delay effects multiply Keef into rippling after-images, like selves receding in a mirrored hotel elevator.
There's a similar glassy iridescence to Travis Scott songs like "Pick Up the Phone" and "Goosebumps."From Rodeo and Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight to Astroworld, Scott's albums could easily be filed under "ambient" as much as rap. If there'sathrough line to his work, it's voice processing: not just Auto-Tune but delays, stereo-sculpted chorusing and harmony structures, phasing, and God knows what else. The result is a panoply of ear-tantalizing tingles: the ghostly flutter of "Pornography" and "Oh My Dis Side," the gaseous moans and sighs of "First Take" and "Sweet Sweet," the Escher-like vocal architectures of "Way Back" and "Who? What?" If anything, this year's Astroworld sounds more like a showcase for production ideas than an integrated collection of emotionally coherent song-statements.
Early in his career Travis Scott worked with Alex Tumay, better known as Young Thug's sound engineer. Even without the involvement of technology, Thug would be the maven of voice mutation. His vocal equipment—throat, palate, tongue, lips, and nasal cavities—amounts to a formidable machinery for the mangling of sound and sense. His mouth is a bubbling font of babble, a zoo-music menagerie of uncaged moans, gibbering whoops, creaky croaks, throttled vowels, and gnashing noises, like an Amazonian shaman tripped out on DMT.
So Thug doesn't really need any help distorting and distending his voice, but he gets it nonetheless from Tumay and his bag of technological tricks. Auto-Tune and other vocal treatments serve for Thug a role similar to the wah-wah effects that Miles Davis applied to his trumpet during his wild '70s phase of fevered fusion. And Tumay is equivalent to Miles' producer Teo Macero: the white co-pilot to the black explorer, creating the optimal conditions for the visionary's creativity to flare with utmost out-there-ness. Where Macero excelled at post-production, piecing together snippets of Miles and his band's jams into the tapestries released as albums like Bitches Brew and On the Corner, Tumay's role with Thug is a rapid-response real-time affair. Reacting on the fly, the engineer throws in delays, Harmony Engine doublings, and other plug-ins so that the rapper hears and responds to them live in the booth; Thug apparently hates it if effects are added after the event, invariably rejecting these additions and alterations.
As with Firkins and Future, the Thug/Tumay collaboration is a symbiosis. Listening to tracks from 2015's Slime Season 2 like "Beast" and "Bout (Damn) Time," you can't really distinguish the rapper's mouth music virtuosity from the engineer's treatments. The man-machine merger peaks with the chopped-and-screwed "Love Me Forever," where Thug's molten wheezes resemble strings of fluorescent ectoplasm being drawn out of his mouth. As a crush-collision of vocal eccentricity and woozy beauty, the track is rivaled only by "Tomorrow 'Til Infinity" off Beautiful Thugger Girls, Thug's "singing album." Here, Thug invents a machine-boosted hyper-falsetto, a frail wavering warble that sound like he's coming with every note. Folding ecstasy upon ecstasy into the word "infinity," Thug reaches piping peaks comparable to Al Green at his most sex-mystical.
Where Thug is on a solo trip to the stars, Migos get there collectively. On Culture and the Culture II, trap goes choral. Tracks like "T-Shirt," "Auto Pilot," and "Top Down on Da NAWF" work as honeycomb lattices of voices keyed to mesh with doo-wop-like perfection, while also being differentiated texturally by contrasting degrees of Auto-Tune—a range from almost naturalistic rapping auto-tweaked for a subtle melodious sheen (Takeoff) right the way across to otherworldly abstraction (Quavo). In these terraced voicescapes, the focal rapper on each verse is shadowed by antiphonal layers. At the first level, there's the continuous stream of ad libs echoing or commenting on the lyric, or syncopating against the groove as non-verbal grunts, whoops and voice-percussion effects that also serve as Migos audio-logos, like the tires-skidding "skrt-skrt-skrt." One layer behind the ad libs, there are gurgling ripples of wordless vocal, Auto-Tuned for zero-speed pitch-correction. Described by rap pundit Sadmanbarty as "murmurs from a Martian crypt," this Migos trademark has a Medieval flavor, a holy rolling drone faintly redolent of the chanting of Benedictine monks. Where the lyrics conjure a profane cartoon of bitches, brutality, and boasting, these blissed-out backing vocals create an effect like stained glass, transfiguring lowlife into highlife. Alongside its unexpected musicality, it's the sheer splendor of the Migos sound that is shocking—the way songs like "Slippery" really do seem to drip and splash with glistening rivulets of light.
The story of Auto-Tune and its commercial rivals in pitch-correction and vocal design is part of a wider phenomenon: the emergence of the voice as the prime area for artistic adventure and innovation in the 21st century. Spanning all the way from Top 40 radio to avant-pop experimentalists, from local dance undergrounds like footwork to internet-spawned micro-genres such as witch house and vaporwave, doing weird shit with the human voice has been the cutting edge for well over a decade now: slowing it down and speeding it up, queering it and mutilating it, micro-editing and resequencing it into new melodic and rhythmic patterns, processing it into amorphous swirly texture-clouds or smearing it across emotional landscapes.
The basic rhythmic grammar of music has not changed as much as we might have expected after the surging advances of the '90s. For the most part, beat-makers have been modifying or stretching the groove templates spawned in the late 20th century: electro, house, techno, jungle, dancehall, post-Timbaland nu-R&B, the Southern style of drum machine driven rap. Instead, the axis of invention has been in the domain of sound-design—the intricate gloss of high-definition production, now achievable more easily and cheaply than ever before—and in the area of vocal manipulation: treating a singer's performance not as a sacrosanct emotional expression to be kept intact but as raw material to be sculpted and, at the extreme, overwritten with new emotional content.
The question that remains is: Why? Why is Auto-Tune in particular and vocal manipulation in general so pervasive, so epoch-defining? Why does it sound so good? (To some ears, at least—usually younger ears; while other, generally older ears recoil still from its artificiality.) Finally, why does it sound so right?
It must be because the Auto-Tune sparkle suits the feel of our time. When everything else in the culture is digitally maxed out and hyper-edited, how could the human voice stay unscathed? The sheen of Auto-Tune fits an entertainment landscape of high-definition screens, retina-wrenching 3D camera movements, motion-retouching, and grading that sands down skin-tones into porcelain perfection and make colors "pop" with hallucinatory vividness.
When our emotional and social arrangements increasingly occur via info-mechanisms—DMs and FaceTime, Snapchat and Tinder, Instagram and YouTube—and when we habitually use editing and processing to tint and tidy up the image we present of ourselves to the world, it's easy to see why we've gotten used to pop stars using artificial processes to disguise their imperfect selves, from their videos to what was once thought of as the singer's most intimately innermost possession and deepest personal truth: the voice. It makes absolute sense that Auto-Tuned singing—bodily breath transubstantiated into beyond-human data—is how desire, heartbreak, and the rest of the emotions sound today. Digital soul, for digital beings, leading digital lives.
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