Rise of the Singing Robots
Source: By David Dacks, AOL.ca
Posted: 11/10/08 3:18PM
Filed Under: Music
A musical decade used to be defined by the emergence of a new style—rock'n'roll in the ’50s, disco and punk in the '70s, grunge in the ’90s. But this decade will be defined by something much more ephemeral than a genre.
The sound of the '00s is, to quote Snoop Dogg, the sensual seduction of Auto-Tune. Ten years after the Voice 2.0 technology made its sensational debut in the chorus of Cher's "Believe," the “Cher effect” remains a fixture of contemporary pop with this week’s release of T-Pain’s newest album Thr33 Ringz.
Autotuning has evolved from being a quick-fix for lackluster vocals to an enabler of new kinds of android singing sensibilities the world over. The process is fairly simple says sound engineer, and proprietor of Hometracked.com, Des McKinney. “The software analyses audio and makes a determination about what pitch it’s hearing and adjusts that pitch as it needs to, to bring it in line with the rest of the music.” So if you’re a vocalist and you warble out of tune—like when Randy Jackson calls someone “pitchy” on Idol—an autotuner will fix it.
The process debuted as a software plug-in for the ubiquitous ProTools computer music program in 1997 but has since spread to a wide-range of digital recording platforms, which are now used in the vast majority of recording studios. The program was envisioned to be used subtly and transparently.
But the game quickly changed upon the release of “Believe.” The robotic modulation of the chorus, which occurs when settings of the plug in are set too fast to correct the audio input, created an instant pop gimmick. The song’s massive crossover success—over 10 million singles sold, making it one of the most successful songs ever—soon spawned imitators.
McKinney first noticed pop bands abusing Auto-Tune when Kid Rock released “Only God Knows Why.” Kid’s voice sounds like it’s being stretched to join two points on a graph rather than gliding from pitch to pitch. “I couldn’t stand it,” says McKinney. “It was unimaginably bad.”
One of McKinney’s most popular articles on Hometracked.com is a list of autotuner lowlights. Each example is distinguished by excessive and questionable uses of the process to sandblast any wavering vocals to a fine sheen. For instance, Rascal Flatts’ singing on “Life Is A Highway” is as even and smooth as a freshly paved road. The use of autotuning in Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” is more demure, but there’s an unnatural low range in her voice that she’d no doubt be hard pressed to hit in real life.
The knock against autotuning is that it turns singers into robots. For many artists, it represents the worst aspects of studio craft—where any no-talent artist can achieve utter pop perfection at the flip of a switch (as immortalized in The Simpsons’ boy band satire “New Kids On The Blecch”). Neko Case told Pitchfork that autotuning is unnatural and unsettling “like that taste in diet soda, I can taste it—and it makes me sick.”
Of course, this argument is inevitable when any new, hot musical tech comes along. When sampled loops became popular during the mid-80s, they were also deemed unmusical. Nowadays, the “sampladelic” era which gave rise to De La Soul and Public Enemy is viewed as a golden age of creativity. Every technology breeds those who resist and those who embrace it. McKinney sensibly argues that autotune usage in itself isn’t a problem; it’s when engineers use it indiscriminately that it sounds like a cheap trick.
And then there’s T-Pain.
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“I’m Sprung” and “Buy U A Drank” are the work of someone, like Darth Vader, whose entire career is inseparable from manipulated vocals. If anything, T-Pain is a master at building hooks based on the relationship between his slender vocal abilities and modern technology.
T-Pain himself is cagey when it comes to how he feels about the processing. He started using the effect on his 2005 debut album Rappa Ternt Sanga to give himself a bit of an edge on the competition. He recently told Blender magazine, “I wanted to sound different, Auto-Tune was my way of being André 3000.” In interviews to promote Thr33 Ringz, he claims to be tiring of the effect, but still asserts his utter supremacy with the sound. In fact, certain tracks on the new album see him paying tribute to autotuning—if he isn’t the first singer to praise his studio gear, he probably won’t be the last.
Thr33 Ringz continues to develop the fetish. Responding to autotuned hits by like Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” (which opened the door for the effect’s use with rapping rather than singing) and “Love Lockdown” by Kanye West, who guests on the disc, Thr33 attacks even harder with cloned voices throughout the stereo spectrum. T-Pain has achieved an ethereal presence with his pseudo-voice: he’s overhauled what would otherwise be relatively standard-issue songs about strippers and hustling into a form of robotic choral music for the 21st century. It’s the dazzling veneer dressing up his ordinary voice that resonates with your average fan. That same fan that takes their broken-down car and tricks it out in chrome, neon and major speaker wattage. This potential for transformation is where autotuning gets interesting.
Jace Clayton, aka DJ/Rupture, is an electronic musician, broadcaster and blogger who has documented the many moods of autotuning far beyond Western pop and hip-hop. Rupture’s blog is deep with examples of massively autotuned songs from North and West Africa, and South and Central America.
While living in Barcelona in 2003, he began to notice music from North Africa, particularly Moroccan Berber music, digging into the Cher effect. “There are albums with full autotune where every single vocal has it; for me it was incredible. It was only a couple of years later that T-Pain and more American artists really started hitting it.”
Arabic scales produce different kinds of harmonies than the Western ones to which autotuners are set, so the contrast between man and machine produces otherworldly results. “There’s a real appeal to the melisma in Arabic singing; this fluttering between pitches and tones. If you like autotuning, the voice flitting around with this computer element does some sonically incredible things.”
It’s short-sighted to dismiss autotuning at a moment when its use is both more perverse and more subtle than ever before. McKinney, who was gob-smacked by the music on Rupture’s site, concurs that autotuning is moving into ever more creative directions at the same time that a backlash against the sound continues to grow. “I know guys who use it on instruments. There’s no reason you can’t run a guitar through it; if you deliberately play your guitar out of tune, you get this digitized effect.”
The Cher Effect will likely lose its currency in the Western pop music, but that’s doesn’t mean that autotuning is going to go away. “Ninety percent of autotune is purely corrective so we can’t even hear how pervasive it is in modern production,” he notes.
But in Rupture’s view, autotuning is a means of augmenting, not stealing soul. “There’s something very humanizing about Auto-Tune. I see it as a duet between the electronics and the personal. It’s not like it’s making a voice sound computer-y, it’s a third, more interesting cyborg possibility—a reconciliation with technology. It’s a duet. I live in a world saturated by electronics and we’re finding a way to make that sing.”
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