wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

During our annual Critics Week last week, at least two or three of our guests alluded to Auto-Tune, with one, Jody Rosen of Slate.com, referring to 2008 as The Year of Auto-Tune. You may not know what Auto-Tune is, but you have heard it. A lot. Auto-Tune is essentially a pitch-correcting device, and it allows a record producer to take a note that’s sung off-key and “tune” it up or down to the correct pitch. It’s been around for about a decade, fixing things in its own quiet way, and propping up the Britney Spears and Paris Hiltons of the music world. But it has occasionally been used for more unusual effects, as in Cher’s 1998 song “Believe” or Lil Wayne’s current hit “Lollipop.” Here, the pitch correction is set to work at an unnaturally fast speed and to move the pitch far enough that you actually hear the Auto-Tune program up front. The result is a robotic effect that has colored a lot of pop music in the last couple of years.

Some people feel that Auto-Tune is cheating. I wonder how these people feel about editing, multi-tracking, adding reverb, and all the other tricks of the modern recording studio… Lets’ face it: recorded music and live music are usually completely different animals. The former is created in a studio and polished and buffed until it has a nice professional gleam. Live music is a shaggier beast, which is why bands that play live music really well tend to be the ones with the rabid fan bases and the ones that last. Even classical music recordings are usually edited together from multiple takes – the album cover may say it’s a live recording, but usually, that orchestra has played the same piece on consecutive nights and has put the best parts together.

This is not misleading, or deceptive. It is how recorded music is made. And most listeners don’t care about how the recording was made, as long as it moves them somehow. So Auto-Tune, like Peter Frampton’s talk-box and the keyboard vocoders of the 70s and 80s, is just another part of the record producer’s arsenal. And like anything else, it can be used tastefully, or it can be overused and clichéd. We are getting perilously close to the latter. Just as cheesy drum machines became the signature sound of early 1980s pop, the Auto-Tuned voice is threatening to become the future kitsch factor for music of the late ‘00s.

Tell us: What do you think of Auto-Tune? Does it bother you to know it’s there? Is it somehow less deceptive when it’s used in an obvious, artificial way? Leave a comment