The age of egregious Auto-tuning: 1998-2009

When Antares Audio Technologies founder Andy Hildebrand filed for the patent for his digital pitch correction technology more than ten years ago, I wonder if he ever thought that it would be such an inescapable and controversial part of modern music.

After the pop-consuming world was exposed to producer Mark Taylor's use of the inhuman, disjointed vocal effect on Cher in her 1998 single Believe, Antares Auto-tune and its scions became a mandatory fixture in any modern studio. Soon, it catapulted to the position of best-selling audio plug-in of all time. This tool could turn weak tones into strong ones, add vibrato to held notes, and turn a mediocre (or even terrible) singer into a good one, provided a certain willingness to overlook the cyborg-sounding artifacts.

Recording magazine called it the "holy grail of recording," and the technology has reached critical mass in the pop charts, with new songs every day blatantly using it. Kanye West relied almost totally on the plug-in to create his 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak, and robotic auto-tuning has become a stylistic trademark of 8-time Grammy award nominated producer T-Pain. Even Bob Mould, the frontman of '80s punk legends Husker Du used the plug-in throughout his Body of Song solo album.

Why even your humble correspondent was auto-tuned once. At the behest of my bandmates for a single we recorded in 1999, my vocals were digitally corrected. At first it sounded neat, but I then became acutely aware of the auto-tune squawk and could pick it up in everything, even in its subtle uses where a decent singer used it to make his vocals perfect. I used to look at it as artifice because I frequently meet people who couldn't identify an auto-tuned singer if she was glitching her way through an a capella rendition of "Happy Birthday."

This could be because of the even more obvious vocal trickery that has existed since the Second World War with techniques such as Sonovox or Talkboxing, which involves using the human mouth to shape amplified instrument sounds (like Peter Frampton's guitar in Do you Feel Like we do in 1973); and later Musical Vocoding, which uses the signal from a microphone to modulate synthesizer sounds (such as those heard in Electric Light Orchestra's Mr. Blue Sky.) Hildebrand's invention differs in that it is based on capturing loops and re-sampling them at a different pitch.

According to the Auto-Tune patent, "The period of the waveform is then compared to a desired period or periods (such as found in a scale). The ratio of the waveform period and the desired period is computed to re-sample the waveform. This ratio is smoothed over time to remove instantaneous output pitch changes. The ratio is used to resample the input waveform. The resulting output waveform is processed through a digital-to-analog converter and output through audio interfaces."

Apparently, waves of professional musicians have heard just about enough of the technology, and have begun to take a stand against the overuse of Antares' famous plug-in. The band Death Cab for Cutie showed up to the Grammy Awards last February wearing blue awareness ribbons which represented auto-tune abuse. Death Cab's lead singer Ben Gibbard, who endorses Real's Rhapsody service, said, "Auto-tuning is...affecting literally thousands of singers today and thousands of records that are coming out. We just want to raise awareness while we're here and try to bring back the blue note... The note that's not so perfectly in pitch and just gives the recording some soul and some kind of real character. It's how people really sing."

Last week, Jay-Z took a big swipe at the rap community's overuse of the technology by releasing a song entitled "D.O.A." or "Death of Auto-Tune."

Within the song, Jay-Z declares, "This is Anti-Autotune, death of the ringtone, this ain't for iTunes, this ain't for sing-alongs..." Later, he goes on to call for a moment of silence for Auto-tune and breaks into an extremely off-key rendition of Steam's "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye."

As foul as Jay-Z's singing is in that section, it is at least genuine, and in a genre of music where catchiness and credibility are always at odds with one another, he is taking a definite stand. Pop music, on the other hand, is a big copycat game. One person will strike out in a new direction, and if it is successful, a hundred imitators will pop up doing the same thing. So if enough stars speak out against auto-tuning, such as Gibbard and Death Cab for Cutie, maybe the bar will be raised again for vocalists and Auto-tune will be used simply as a corrective tool, not the brush with which entire murals are painted.