In January of 2010, Kesha Sebert, known as ‘Ke$ha’ debuted at number one on Billboard with her album, Animal.
Her style is electro pop-y dance music: she alternates between rapping
and singing, the choruses of her songs are typically melodic party hooks
that bore deep into your brain: “Your love, your love, your love, is my
drug!” And at times, her voice is so heavily processed that it sounds
like a cross between a girl and a synthesizer. Much of her sound is due
to the pitch correction software, Auto-Tune.
Sebert, whose label did not respond to a request for an interview, has built a persona as a badass wastoid, who told Rolling Stone that all male visitors to her tour bus had to submit to being photographed with their pants down. Even the bus drivers.
Yet this past November on the Today Show, the 25-year old Sebert looked vulnerable, standing awkwardly in her skimpy purple, gold, and green unitard. She was there to promote her new album, Warrior, which was supposed to reveal the authentic her.
Sebert, whose label did not respond to a request for an interview, has built a persona as a badass wastoid, who told Rolling Stone that all male visitors to her tour bus had to submit to being photographed with their pants down. Even the bus drivers.
Yet this past November on the Today Show, the 25-year old Sebert looked vulnerable, standing awkwardly in her skimpy purple, gold, and green unitard. She was there to promote her new album, Warrior, which was supposed to reveal the authentic her.
“Was it really important to let your voice to be heard?” asked the host, Savannah Guthrie.“Absolutely,” Sebert said, gripping the mic nervously in her fingerless black gloves.
“People think they’ve heard the Auto-Tune, they’ve heard the dance hits, but you really have a great voice, too,” said Guthrie, helpfully.
“No, I got, like, bummed out when I heard that,” said Sebert, sadly. “Because I really can sing. It’s one of the few things I can do.”
Warrior starts with a shredding electrical static noise, then comes her voice, sounding like what the Guardian called “a robo squawk devoid of all emotion.”
“That’s pitch correction software for sure,” wrote Drew Waters, Head of Studio Operations at Capitol Records, in an email. “She may be able to sing, but she or the producer chose to put her voice through Auto-Tune or a similar plug-in as an aesthetic choice.”
So much for showing the world the authentic Ke$ha.
Since rising to fame as the weird techno-warble effect in the chorus of Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe,” Auto-Tune has become bitchy shorthand for saying somebody can’t sing. But the diss isn’t fair, because everybody’s using it.
For every T-Pain — the R&B artist who uses Auto-Tune as an over-the-top aesthetic choice — there are 100 artists who are Auto-Tuned in subtler ways. Fix a little backing harmony here, bump a flat note up to diva-worthy heights there: smooth everything over so that it’s perfect. You can even use Auto-Tune live, so an artist can sing totally out of tune in concert and be corrected before their flaws ever reach the ears of an audience. (On season 7 of the UK X-Factor, it was used so excessively on contestants’ auditions that viewers got wise, and protested.)
Indeed, finding out that all the singers we listen to have been Auto-Tuned does feel like someone’s messing with us. As humans, we crave connection, not perfection. But we’re not the ones pulling the levers. What happens when an entire industry decides it’s safer to bet on the robot? Will we start to hate the sound of our own voices?
They’re all zombies!
Auto-Tune has now become bitchy shorthand for saying somebody can’t sing
Cher’s late ‘90s comeback and makeover as a gay icon can entirely be attributed to Auto-Tune, though the song's producers claimed for years
that it was a Digitech Talker vocoder pedal effect. In 1998, she
released the single, “Believe,” which featured a strange, robotic vocal
effect on the chorus that felt fresh. It was created with Auto-Tune.
The technology, which debuted in 1997 as a plug-in for Pro Tools (the industry standard recording software), works like this: you select the key the song is in, and then Auto-Tune analyzes the singer’s vocal line, moving “wrong” notes up or down to what it guesses is the intended pitch. You can control the time it takes for the program to move the pitch: slower is more natural, faster makes the jump sudden and inhuman sounding. Cher’s producers chose the fastest possible setting, the so-called “zero” setting, for maximum pop.
“Believe” was a huge hit, but among music nerds, it was polarizing. Indie rock producer Steve Albini, who’s recorded bands like the Pixies and Nirvana, has said he thought the song was mind-numbingly awful, and was aghast to see people he respected seduced by Auto-Tune.
“One by one, I could see that my friends had gone zombie. This horrible piece of music with this ugly soon-to-be cliché was now being discussed as something that was awesome. It made my heart fall,” he told the Onion AV Club in November of 2012.
The Auto-Tune effect spread like a slow burn through the industry, especially within the R&B and dance music communities. T-Pain began Cher-style Auto-Tuning all his vocals, and a decade later, he’s still doing it.
“It’s makin’ me money, so I ain’t about to stop!” T-Pain told DJ Skee in 2008.
The technology, which debuted in 1997 as a plug-in for Pro Tools (the industry standard recording software), works like this: you select the key the song is in, and then Auto-Tune analyzes the singer’s vocal line, moving “wrong” notes up or down to what it guesses is the intended pitch. You can control the time it takes for the program to move the pitch: slower is more natural, faster makes the jump sudden and inhuman sounding. Cher’s producers chose the fastest possible setting, the so-called “zero” setting, for maximum pop.
“Believe” was a huge hit, but among music nerds, it was polarizing. Indie rock producer Steve Albini, who’s recorded bands like the Pixies and Nirvana, has said he thought the song was mind-numbingly awful, and was aghast to see people he respected seduced by Auto-Tune.
“One by one, I could see that my friends had gone zombie. This horrible piece of music with this ugly soon-to-be cliché was now being discussed as something that was awesome. It made my heart fall,” he told the Onion AV Club in November of 2012.
The Auto-Tune effect spread like a slow burn through the industry, especially within the R&B and dance music communities. T-Pain began Cher-style Auto-Tuning all his vocals, and a decade later, he’s still doing it.
“It’s makin’ me money, so I ain’t about to stop!” T-Pain told DJ Skee in 2008.
“It’s makin’ me money, so I ain’t about to stop!”Kanye West did an album with it. Lady Gaga uses it. Madonna, too. Maroon 5. Even the artistically high-minded Bon Iver has dabbled. A YouTube series where TV news clips were Auto-Tuned, “Auto-Tune the News”, went viral. The glitchy Auto-Tune mode seems destined to be remembered as the “sound” of the 2000s, the way the gated snare (that dense, big, reverb-y drum sound on, say, Phil Collins songs) is now remembered as the sound of the ‘80s.
Auto-Tune certainly isn’t the only robot voice effect to have wormed its way into pop music. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, voice synthesizer effects units became popular with a lot of bands. Most famous is the Vocoder, originally invented in the 1930s to send encoded Allied messages during WWII. Proto-techno groups like New Order and Kraftwerk (ie: “Computer World,”) embraced it. So did American early funk and hip hop groups like the Jonzun Crew.
‘70s rockers gravitated towards another effect, the talk box. Peter Frampton (listen for it on “Do you Feel Like We Do”) and Joe Walsh (used it on “Rocky Mountain Way”) liked its similar-to-a-vocoder sound. The talk box was easier to rig up than the Vocoder — you operate it via a rubber mouth tube when applying it to vocals. But it produces massive amounts of slobber. In Dave Tompkins’ book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, about the history of synthesized speech machines in the music industry, he writes that Frampton’s roadies sanitized his talk box in Remy Martin Cognac between gigs.
The use of showy effects usually have a backlash. And in the case of the Auto-Tune warble, Jay-Z struck back with the 2009 single, D.O.A., or “Death of Auto-Tune.”
I know we facing a recession
But the music y'all making going make it the great depression
All y'all lack aggression
Put your skirt back down, grow a set man
Nigga this shit violent
This is death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence
That same year, the band Death Cab for Cutie showed up at the Grammys wearing blue ribbons to raise awareness, they told MTV, about “rampant Auto-Tune abuse.”
The protests came too late, though. The lid to Pandora’s box had been lifted. Music producers everywhere were installing the software.
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