Why is auto tune so popular

The warble has a delightful set of qualities of its own. It introduces new rhythms into previously rhythmless sustained notes. If you add a little digital delay, the warble locks satisfyingly into the beat of the song. A quick fillip to a neighboring chord tone that would normally pass unnoticed by singer and listener alike suddenly takes on dramatic musical significance when exaggerated by Auto-Tune.

Cultures that favor melismatic vocal techniques naturally find this effect to be fascinating. Hat tip to Jace Clayton for this example. Auto-Tuned speech has remarkable qualities of its own, as rappers discovered years ago. Human speech is strongly tonal to begin with. When you automatically tune it to the closest piano-key pitches, you can more easily hear the melodies that were already present. By quantizing and digitizing information, you make it easier to memorize and replicate it.

Digitized sound information is easier to memorize, store and copy. Spend some time in the studio, however, and you discover quickly that to sound good through Auto-Tune, the singer has to be good to begin with. 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.

The freaky-sounding Throat EVO maps the vocal tract as a physical structure, just like Hildebrand mapping the oil fields miles underground. 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.

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. 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. The true voice, the definitive performance, is Auto-Tuned right from the start. Rap of the s 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. 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. Launched on the music technology market in early , 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 blobs can be stretched or squished by dragging the cursor. 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. Emotion itself becomes raw material to be edited. 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. 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. 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. 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 s 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.

In time, T-Pain would complain that s and Heartbreak received the critical praise that his debut album, Rappa Ternt Sanga , should have got four years earlier.

Every vocal in the track is Auto-Tuned to the max. In , the first big backlash against the omnipresence of Auto-Tune kicked off. 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. But I really studied this shit The backlash kept on coming. This song is about raging against it and letting it go.

Much of this anti-Auto-Tune sentiment presented the idea that the technology is a dehumanizing deception foisted upon the public. 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.

This is exactly the same business that Auto-Tune and Melodyne are in. 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.

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. Which is true, but it also suggests that the voice is just like a violin or a Moog synthesizer: an apparatus for sound-generation. People may be right when they think of it as a kind of cheating. Then again, it was an open secret in the industry that 80s recording artists like Madonna and Paula Abdul needed help — a lot of help — with their vocals.

Auto-Tune is just the latest kind of fakery. Auto-Tune is everywhere for three reasons: it makes singers sound better, some people like that robotic sound, and it helps make hits. And since the music business is a business, that third reason is probably the biggest. There is a lot to be said for the unadorned human voice. So Auto-Tune is really like any another effect. There is nothing wrong with using it judiciously. In fact, it can save a lot of time and money in the studio.

Rely on it too much, and you risk sounding kind of ridiculous. Either way, Auto-Tune is here to stay. That is, until the next big game-changing piece of technology comes along.

Is Auto-Tune a useful tool? Is it an effect? It can be all of these things. It is to be used by the audio engineer, and it is up to the listener whether they accept the use of Auto-Tune as a parlor trick or amazing effect.