Auto-Tune: The Science of Perfect Pitch

Auto-tune, a voice-tuning music software plugin created by Andy Hildebrand, made its commercial debut in 1998 with Cher’s pop hit “Believe”. Since, it has become an integral part of studio music production and recording, a trick producers use to correct their singer’s voices.

Take a voice, run it through the same mathematical formula, and it adjusts your pitch to the nearest note. So, if you’re in a recording and screw up a note, you can just run the recorded voice through auto-tune, and you’ll get perfect pitch. Even though the low retune speed is obvious in T-Pain’s and Kanye West’s electric fan vocals, most listeners have no idea that auto-tune is used in almost every recorded song.

The technology, called Autocorrelation, was originally designed for deep-sea oil drilling, but Hildebrand later adjusted the formula to work for human voices and thus, Auto-tune was born. It can be deceptive when used sparingly. It’s so subtle that even with a great musical ear you probably can’t tell when it’s being used. The problem is that it creates lazy singing, because artists know that they only have to get close to the notes, and presume that producers will just run their voice through the “box”.

Rick Rubin, one of the industry’s foremost producers, told Time:

“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, [but] 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.”

Studio-time is money, and labels always want to save money, so you can be sure every artist has their vocals perfected with auto-tune. Do you notice how pop songs have same-sounding vocals, and differ greatly from more traditional, for example, blues singing?

The bigger question is whether this technology affects the authenticity of vocals. Are we becoming accustomed to artificially tweaked voices in music?

Source: Slashdot