Speed Warping
Rita's thoughts on Auto-Tune
I came of age in the post-punk 1980s, and I’m a fan of electronic music. Although synthesizers and computers have been used to magnificent effect by many great musicians, the very best use that technology to enhance, rather than to cover up the human aspects of the music.
The autotune manipulation of pop music today, on the other hand, often obscures what is inherently good in a voice, or serves to make a singer with pitch problems into something tolerable to hear. You may not know what autotune is, but you’ve been hearing it for three decades. The most prominent example is “Believe” by Cher, which I know you know. The producers squoze Cher’s distinctive voice through microprocessors that center the pitch precisely, and because it was meant to be an electronic dance-floor hit, they showcased the manipulation, rather than trying to hide it. For this purpose, the technique works. It made a fun bit of fluff to which one might boogie down forthwith, and we’re none the worse for it. Cher was a strong singer in her heyday, but I think in the case of this song, the autotune was meant to achieve a particular effect, rather than mask wobbly/uncentered pitches from the vocalist.
Since Cher’s big hit, though, other singers who are not such strong vocalists have gotten a leg up with electronic manipulation of their vocals to center the pitch, generally. Heavily autotuned singers include Britney Spears, T-Pain, and others. The effect is eerie and definitely in the uncanny valley zone, but I’m fine with it so long as it stays in its lane.
At a restaurant recently, I was mortified to hear a song by Lady Gaga wherein her voice is heavily manipulated by autotune (“Abracadabra”). I’m not a fan of Lady Gaga by a long shot, but she is an impeccable musician who seems to have zero issues with pitch—hitting the center of the intended note comes naturally to her. Why, then, would she and/or her producers see the need to incorporate this stylistic flourish onto the voice of someone who is one of the strongest and best vocalists in the field?
It’s actually an outrage. It would have been obscene to manipulate the voice of Freddie Mercury thusly. Or Elvis. Why would you? In the case of Lady Gaga, it seems to make her less herself. Good or bad, she can kick out the jams and it seems vulgar to dull the shine of her God-given instrument.
The prevalence of this dehumanizing component in music seems to dovetail with many other flavors of operant conditioning to which we seem to be treated on a daily basis. It seems to say that the mere human voice is not enough as it is, and someone needs to tinker around and make it some machine-human hybrid. This seems a fitting side-car to social engineering that tells a kid their “empathetic” and “open-minded” friends from (insert social media flavor here) are their real family now, and those pesky people wot birthed them are relics of another age and are to be dismissed.
Call me paranoid and old-fashioned, but this seems to be a celebration of electronics and a diminution of the human voice. Perhaps autotune will fade to obscurity, but it seems more likely that it’s a warping component that is turning popular music into more and more of a liminal space as time progresses.
Rita
Rick Beato has a post on his youtube channel about how the combination of home recording, autotune, and synthesized instruments, along with the elimination of sound engineers or producers, has destroyed the music publishing business and resulted in a lack of quality product. (I paraphrase and might have small details wrong).
I too HATE autotune. And they're doing it to EVERYONE now and in many cases, when they do it to someone like Lady Gaga, they're doing it without permission.
There's an artist on youtube (I think it's 'wings of Pegasus') who has been exposing all of the autotuned shows (that's right, they're autotuning -live- shows) as well as the recordings (lip-syncing is coming back at concerts - even the Eagles have been caught doing it now). For some reason there are all these producers and even bands who think that no one wants to hear the human voice anymore, not understanding that it's the imperfections that make a song perfect.
Been seeing the same thing in a lot of art where artists who were actually good, are using AI filters to make their art 'better', but are -in fact- making their art Worse. (Subtle Diffusion is the filter/process here).
When everything looks or sounds the same, it's not Art anymore.
To paraphrase a line from an old story 'his art wasn't a horse, the lines were wrong to actually be a horse, but it was those lines that made the horse more of a horse, that captured the actual horseness of the horse and made it so much more than just a horse'.
Autotune is taking that away from us.