Categories: Opinion and Editorial

Is Auto Tune Ruining Music?

Is it any wonder with everything going high-tech in the last ten to fifteen years that music would inevitably be affected too? I am one of those people who is a music purist. You’ll find them in various genres of music, especially with classical, jazz, blues, and the early years of rock. A purist in any form of entertainment, sports, or the arts want to keep the traditions alive without any adulterations, alterations, or dilutions.

What use to be a trade secret in the music industry has now become a serious force to be reckoned with, auto-tune. Some of you may wonder what is auto-tune? I had heard of it, but wasn’t exactly sure what it was. It is quite simply a downloadable studio trick that takes a vocal and magically transforms it to hitting the proper notes and being pitched perfect in the process. Think of it this way as the Photoshop for a singer’s voice. If that is what’s being done nowadays why bother having singers? You might as well grab someone off the street, put them in a recording studio, and presto. Auto tuning takes care of the rest.

This software program was created in 1997 as a means to filter out a singer’s voice through Auto-Tune, where the pitch is then tweaked. Its robotic sound effect became prominent in the 1990’s from Cher’s hit song “Believe”, or what is sometimes referred to now as “The Cher effect”. Prior to the 90’s very experimental artists in the 70’s used an earlier tool to correct pitch problems called a vocoder, which is a hybrid of the words “voice” and “encoder”. You could hear this in the Styx song from the 80’s, “Mr. Roboto”.

Nowadays the vocoder and auto-tune are heard everywhere in contemporary music from such artists as the Back Eyed Peas to Lady Gaga to Kayne West. However, the artist most associated with his penchant for auto-tune is none other than T-Pain. This debate reminds me of the one from the early to mid 90’s when lip-synching was brought to the forefront from Milli Vanilli’s bogus recordings. The artists performing “live”, and who won the Grammy for Best New Artist, were not the ones doing the actual recordings.

Thankfully there are some contemporary artists out there who feel the same way I do about auto-tune. Jay-Z is by far the most passionate on this topic. His single “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” is his stance against fellow artists using this ubiquitous pitch-correcting software in music. He felt auto-tuning jumped the shark when he saw it used in a fast food TV commercial. Another artist, Wyclef Jean, combated his feelings on auto-tune when he released “Mr. Autotune”, a collaboration he did with Nick Cannon. It featured a great hook that literally says it all “I’m Mr. Autotune/ If you sing off-key/ For a small fee/ I can make you a celebrity.”

Yes, I know music changes over time. That is a given. Many fiercely resisted the early days of rock n’ roll, traditional blues artists are not keen on blues rock, and traditional jazz lovers truly are not fond of jazz fusion. However, auto-tune is not the formation of a music genre. Whatever happened to the wonderful music program, “MTV Unplugged”? That was a brilliant show where artists sang in an intimate setting with just a microphone and basic instruments. Are the music artists today scared of what they might really sound like without auto-tuning?

SOURCES:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purist#Purism_in_music

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1877372,00.html

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1614919/20090629/t_pain.jhtml