“I’m on a modulated wavelength:” Auto-Tune as a Weapon or Tool?
In looking at pop music, one must marvel at the stratospheric rise of Auto-Tune, the little plug-in that could. Auto-Tune, an Antares product that automatically tunes the voice to a correct pitch given the melody (Get it? Auto, tune?), has swept the pop world. This rise is credited as one of the downfalls of music, namely with the loss of vocal character. Those critics are right. It is also credited with enhancing music, giving artists a new sound and avenue of expression. Those critics are also right. Conclusively saying whether Auto-Tune helps or hinders is a difficult question to answer.Now, one must look at Auto-Tune in its first usage: pitch correction. Auto-Tune works in a couple ways. Both start when an artist sings his or her part off of the songwriter’s melody sheet. Then, if you’re sophisticated enough as a producer or engineer, turning on the Auto-Tune modulates the pitch to automatically match to the closest tonal frequency. If you don’t opt for that feature, it’s a bit harder: when each pitch is sung, you hit the tones on a keyboard (onscreen or a physical one), hoping to match each one. As someone who’s put together the Dance from Swan Lake using Sony Acid and pre-recorded guitar loops (worst idea ever), I can assure you that this is a painstaking process, one that I do not wish on anyone. Go with the first solution: let it do it for you.
This use of Auto-Tune is up for serious criticism when you consider how easily it gets abused. A Time magazine article from February 2009 cited Rick Rubin as saying that, “Everything is in perfect pitch, perfect time, and perfect tune.” Auto-Tune is used in almost every Pro Tools-recorded piece nowadays because of how cut-and-paste Pro Tools becomes. Take to take, it’s nearly impossible to have the exact same intonation, leading producers to envelope sections of vocal, guitar, bass, or any other non-digital instrument subject to the laws of “going hella out of tune” and Auto-Tune them to match each other. The problem is that doing this also evens nearly everything about a pitch, namely the intonation shifts when a singer puts breath emphasis. This leads the singer to follow the metronome and the tuning fork correctly, to be sure, but it leads to a much more dead sound. Unfortunately, Auto-Tune is less a recording tool and more a ubiquitous part of the recording process. As Rubin explained, “Sometimes a singer will do lots of takes when they’re recording a song, and you really can hear the emotional difference when someone does a great performance vs. an average one. If you’re pitch-correcting, you might not bother to make the effort. You might just get it done and put it through the machine so it’s all in tune.” As a result, less emotional performances make it onto the record.
The debate rages as to what extent this is a problem. While it is perfectly understandable to bemoan this lack of character, a prevailing current in the pop scene questions whether or not this is even that big a deal. The argument revolves around trying to make records sound as good as possible. Analog junkies, many of whom raise the bastardization of music argument, feel that using older equipment for a warmer, quieter sound is a better track to take — digital producers disagree. To them, the push toward uniform pitch and tempo is a good thing. Auto-Tune and other fix plug-ins correct mistakes that happen in a recording session in an easy and efficient way; why not use the technology to perfect the art? Furthermore, using Auto-Tune now is a necessity in a music listening audience that has grown so used to having it. Aretha Franklin was criticized after the Obama Inauguration for sounding “pitchy.” It may be true that her breath support has taken a few hits since her youth, but this criticism stems fr0m every pop record having pitch correction built on. To compete in this environment, it’s impossible to not use it — so much so that an anonymous engineer said, “Every singer now just presumes that you’ll run their voice through the box.”
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The second usage is a bit more strange. Auto-Tune has been used to warp voices through manipulations of the software. Auto-Tune is set up to correct pitches within a span of zero to 400 milliseconds. By changing what span the program clips at, one creates some very interesting effects. Manipulating them further creates the so-called “T-Pain Effect,” a mix of Auto-Tune’s modulations and some other pitch work.
Pitch correction (and warping) isn’t a new fad; producers have been doing it for decades to fix issues with tape speed or to make a voice sound “younger.” One obvious example is with the Chipmunks. You are naive if you think Ross Bagdasarian had a naturally high and squeaky voice. In actuality, Bagdasarian sped the tape up to make himself sound octaves higher (an interesting side note: Bagdasarian first came to fame through using the David Seville character on the song “The Witch Doctor” — that one song with the “ooh-eeh ooh-aah-aah ting-tang walla-walla-bing-bang” chorus, where he also used that effect), creating a warped, squeaky sound. This was also used to a lesser extent on Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart;” sensing a single, Jon Landau convinced engineer Chuck Plotkin to make Bruce sound a little younger by speeding up the tape to make the entire song a half-step higher. Plotkin had to do that with the tape handed in for Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska simply because of how badly mangled the tape got.
Auto-Tune’s first real step into the artistic warping scene came with Cher’s 1998 single “Believe.” Producers using Auto-Tune to tweak the vocals up ran the program to clip at different speeds. What they discovered was that the resulting effect sounded like the vocals were moving through a fan — the notes would clip at awkward times to catch up with the vibrations in her voice, leading it to act as an accidental delay effect. The effect fell out of favor for about five years (Cher did it. Explanation enough.) until a then-unknown T-Pain started messing around with it. Using it on tracks like “Buy U A Drank” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” exploded it into the popular consciousness. T-Pain uses Auto-Tune in an interesting way, opting to set the clip low enough to be audible and vary it to switch speeds (or, often and somewhat obviously, be missing for phrases at a time). The variance gives his voice a quirkiness akin to a bouncy ball spinning after hitting a crack. It’s a powerful gimmick, one that’s made him a go-to guy in music production.
The “T-Pain” effect, in essence, has been co-opted by tons of artists. Lil Wayne’s mistake of a rock album, Rebirth, features Weezy F. Baby “singing” through the keyboard melody functions in Auto-Tune with the assistance of the Hatted one. Diddy gave Pain a cut of his next album’s profits just to learn a couple things. Prince pondered doing some Auto-Tuned shenanigans on Lotusflow3r. Most intriguingly and beguilingly was Kanye West’s usage of it throughout the emo-rap manifesto 808s and Heartbreak. ‘Ye and T-Pain holed up in Hawaii matching the depressing lyrics with beats that would suit a depressing reading of the Auto-Tune success manual, usually to intriguing (if not very fine) results.
Where Auto-Tune falters as an artistic device is in its seeming limits. Rewiring a drum machine is one thing, but to reprogram Auto-Tune is another thing entirely. Consider this: Auto-Tune’s algorithms come from research into autocorrelation, a technology that computes frequencies to map out less visible landscapes and figure out where to drill for oil. Tweaking those algorithms would require a lot of lucky guess work or a Ph. D in physics, a rather unusual path to music production. Apart from future iterations that open the interface to modulate within the normalization, it’s difficult if not impossible to imagine any more work happening with Auto-Tune itself. Instead, future T-Pains will have to research other plug-ins that match well — running Auto-Tuned things through octave pedals and modulating those, perhaps?
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Ultimately the jury is rightfully hung on Auto-Tune. Overuse is a definite concern in both the technical and artistic uses. Technically, I find Auto-Tune to be a reversion as a singer. I’ll be totally honest in saying that I don’t expect any of music’s stars to actually be decent singers anymore. Auto-Tune, when used to fix bad singing, represents music’s commercialization and sacrifice of quality. However, I do concede that to get the seamless switches between takes (and let’s be honest, I’d almost rather see a band pick and choose moments from several takes unless the first run through is pure magic) a little extra tuning help is needed. Artistically, Auto-Tune is a fun and harmless gimmick. I don’t really see it as anything more than a passing fad to tune yourself to be a robot, though I do see the vocal clips having a little bit of staying power. 808s proved that you can actually use it to make music that isn’t a party sex jam (T-Pain is sort of obsessed with carnal pleasures in clubs… and boats) and instead use it to convey messages in a more powerful form than rap. That said, it’s already growing stale. Without some sort of new innovation, Auto-Tune will be relegated to I Love the Thousands, likely dying before it makes it to the next decade.
