Auto-Tune

Auto-Tune is audio processor software released on September 19, 1997, by the American company Antares Audio Technologies. It uses a proprietary device to measure and correct pitch in music. It operates on different principles from the vocoder or talk box and produces different results. Auto-Tune can be used in both post-production music mixing and in real-time live performances.

Auto-Tune was initially intended to disguise or correct off-key inaccuracies, allowing vocal tracks to be perfectly tuned. Cher's 1998 song "Believe" popularized the use of Auto-Tune to deliberately distort vocals, a technique that became known as the "Cher effect". It has since been used by many artists in different genres, including Daft Punk, Radiohead, T-Pain and Kanye West. In 2018, the music critic Simon Reynolds felt that Auto-Tune had "revolutionized popular music", calling its use for effects "the fad that just wouldn't fade. Its use is now more entrenched than ever."

Function

Auto-Tune is available as a plug-in for digital audio workstations used in a studio setting and as a stand-alone, rack-mounted unit for live performance processing. The processor slightly shifts pitches to the nearest true, correct semitone (to the exact pitch of the nearest note in traditional equal temperament). Auto-Tune can also be used as an effect to distort the human voice when pitch is raised or lowered significantly, such that the voice is heard to leap from note to note stepwise, like a synthesizer.

Auto-Tune has become standard equipment in professional recording studios. Instruments such as the Peavey AT-200 guitar seamlessly use Auto-Tune technology for real-time pitch correction.

Development

Auto-Tune was developed in 1997 by Andy Hildebrand, a Ph.D. research engineer who specialized in stochastic estimation theory and digital signal processing. He conceived the vocal pitch correction technology on the suggestion of a colleague's wife, who had joked that she would benefit from a device to help her sing in tune.

Over several months in early 1996, Hildebrand implemented the algorithm on a custom Macintosh computer. Later that year, he presented the result at the NAMM Show, where it became instantly popular. Hildebrand's method for detecting pitch involved autocorrelation and proved superior to attempts based on feature extraction that had problems processing elements such as diphthongs, leading to sound artifacts. Music engineers had previously considered autocorrelation impractical because of the massive computational effort required. Hildebrand found a mathematical method to overcome this, "a simplification [that] changed a million multiply adds into just four".

According to the Auto-Tune patent, the preferred implementation detail consists, when processing new samples, of reusing the former autocorrelation bin, and adding the product of the new sample with the older sample corresponding to a lag value, while subtracting the autocorrelation product of the sample that correspondingly got out of window.

Originally, Auto-Tune was designed to discreetly correct imprecise intonations to make music more expressive, with the original patent asserting: "When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost." Auto-Tune was launched in September 1997.

Use

The Aphex Twin track "Funny Little Man", from the 1997 EP Come To Daddy, was one of the earliest songs to use Auto-Tune, released less than a month after Auto-Tune. Cher's 1998 song "Believe" was the first commercial recording to use Auto-Tune as a stylistic effect, creating a robotic, futuristic sound. Cher, who proposed the effect, faced resistance from her label but insisted it remain, saying, "You can change [the song] over my dead body". While Auto-Tune was designed to be used subtly to correct vocal performances, the "Believe" producers used extreme settings to create unnaturally rapid corrections in Cher's vocals, thereby removing portamento, the natural slide between pitches in singing. Though Auto-Tune had been commercially available for about a year, according to Pitchfork, "Believe" was the first song "where the effect drew attention to itself ... announcing its technological artifice". In an attempt to protect their method, the producers initially claimed the effect was achieved with a vocoder. It was widely imitated and became known as the "Cher effect".

According to Pitchfork, 1999 "Too Much of Heaven" by the Italian Europop group Eiffel 65 features "the very first example of rapping through Auto-Tune". The Eiffel 65 member Gabry Ponte said they were inspired by Cher's "Believe". The English rock band Radiohead used Auto-Tune on their 2001 album Amnesiac to create a "nasal, depersonalized sound" and to process speech into melody. According to the Radiohead singer, Thom Yorke, Auto-Tune "desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music."

Later in the 2000s, T-Pain used Auto-Tune extensively, further popularizing the use of the effect. He cited the new jack swing producer Teddy Riley and funk artist Roger Troutman's use of the talk box as inspirations. T-Pain became so associated with Auto-Tune that he had an iPhone app named after him that simulated the effect, "I Am T-Pain". Eventually dubbed the "T-Pain effect", the use of Auto-Tune became a fixture of late 2000s music, where it was used in other hip-hop/R&B artists' works, including Snoop Dogg's single "Sexual Eruption", Lil Wayne's "Lollipop", and Kanye West's album 808s & Heartbreak. In 2009 the Black Eyed Peas' number-one hit "Boom Boom Pow", made heavy use of Auto-Tune on their vocals to create a futuristic sound. The use of Auto-Tune in hip-hop gained a resurgence in the mid-2010s, especially in trap music. Future and Young Thug are widely considered to be the pioneers of modern trap music and have mentored or inspired popular artists such as Lil Baby, Gunna, Playboi Carti, Travis Scott, and Lil Uzi Vert.

The effect has also become popular in raï music and other genres from Northern Africa. According to the Boston Herald, the country singers Faith Hill, Shania Twain, and Tim McGraw use Auto-Tune in performance, calling it a safety net that guarantees a good performance. However, other country singers, such as Allison Moorer, Garth Brooks, Big & Rich, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill and Martina McBride, have refused to use Auto-Tune.

Reception

Positive

Some critics have argued that Auto-Tune opens up new possibilities in pop music, especially in hip-hop and R&B. Instead of using it as a correction tool for poor vocals—its original purpose—some musicians intentionally use the technology to mediate and augment their artistic expression. When the electronic duo Daft Punk was questioned about their use of Auto-Tune in their single "One More Time", Thomas Bangalter replied, "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesizer... They didn't see that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before."

T-Pain, the R&B singer and rapper who reintroduced the use of Auto-Tune as a vocal effect in pop music with his album Rappa Ternt Sanga in 2005, said, "My dad always told me that anyone's voice is just another instrument added to the music. There was a time when people had seven-minute songs, and five minutes were just straight instrumental. ... I got a lot of influence from [the '60s era]. I thought I might as well turn my voice into a saxophone." Following in T-Pain's footsteps, Lil Wayne experimented with Auto-Tune between his albums Tha Carter II and Tha Carter III. At the time, he was heavily addicted to promethazine codeine, and some critics see Auto-Tune as a musical expression of Wayne's loneliness and depression. Mark Anthony Neal wrote that Lil Wayne's vocal uniqueness, his "slurs, blurs, bleeps and blushes of his vocals, index some variety of trauma." And Kevin Driscoll asks, "Is Auto-Tune not the wah pedal of today's black pop? Before he transformed himself into T-Wayne on "Lollipop", Wayne's pop presence was limited to guest verses and unauthorized freestyles. In the same way that Miles equipped Hendrix to stay pop-relevant, Wayne's flirtation with the VST plugin du jour brought him updial from JAMN 94.5 to KISS 108."

Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak was generally well received by critics, and it similarly used Auto-Tune to represent a fragmented soul, following his mother's death. The album marks a departure from his previous album, Graduation. Describing the album as a breakup album, Rolling Stone music critic Jody Rosen wrote, "Kanye can't really sing in the classic sense, but he's not trying to. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn't just sharpen flat notes: It's a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness and upping the pathos ... Kanye's digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he's become less than human."

YouTuber Conor Maynard, who received criticism for his use of Auto-Tune, defended it in an interview on the Zach Sang Show in 2019, stating: "It doesn't mean you can't sing ... Auto-Tune can't make anyone who can't sing sound like they can sing ... It just tightens it up slightly because we're human and not perfect, whereas [Auto-Tune] is literally digitally perfect."