Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1877372,00.html

by ALee • 17 years ago

75 96 17 years ago

biohacker422• 17 years ago

I like The White Stripes a lot, but I've heard a few live performances, and... is it just me or is Jack not able to hit the right pitch to save his life?

coglethorpe2• 17 years ago

There's a lot more to The White Stripes than singing in tune. :-) Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin said it pretty well on his "60 Minutes" interview. He said that enthusiasm counted for a lot, more than in his singing, which was decidedly off in the clips of him playing live that ran during the interview.

The Stripes have a whole package, from their brother/sister husband/wife pairing, to the goth vibe, to the artsy videos. Somehow they hit on something that people like, even if it's out of tune.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

Holy crap, I think we just found a way to link Chris Martin (Coldplay) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)!

pxlpshr2• 17 years ago

Auto-tune has been in use for a long time, I guess America is finally waking up to its pop-u-liciuos facade? Lets hope so. MTV ruined music when they made presentation more important than sound.

Music was great in the past-time because radio was the mass-medium and sound doesn't discriminate against physical characteristics that would otherwise make one unattractive for marketing.

dag• 17 years ago

Remember that The Monkees predated MTV.

pxlpshr2• 17 years ago

How many years has it been since there was a blind or deaf musician on top charts? :)

Dilpil• 17 years ago

I'm not sure it makes sense to be concerned with whether or not a song was made by a singer or an engineer, or about anything besides the song itself for that matter.

Jebdm• 17 years ago

Well, it does make live shows more difficult.

tricky7• 17 years ago

A lot of performers run auto-tune real time when they play live. I got to sit behind the board when a friend of mine ran sound for nsync. He let me hear the signal before it went thru the autotune box. hi-larious.

musiq• 17 years ago

We used to do "comping" of vocals back in the 80's, and afaik it's been done since the early 70's. We did this on the 2" 24 track tape recorder by copying/re-recording bits of multiple takes onto a single track.

Then came Auto-Tune. That meant that less perfect singers no longer would have to strain themselves by performing a dozen tracks, we could do with three or four, focusing on performance and feel. AT would assist with the pitch. Sessions actually became more creative, since the tools were better than before.

So "perfect vocals" have been around way longer than Auto-Tune. We just did it in a more tedious way, and wore out the singers vocal cords in the process. Pop is just pop. Other genres will always cater for those who want to listen to more "real music".

mattmaroon8• 17 years ago

That last part was my first thought. Everything else about pop music is highly synthesized and scientifically produced. Why not the vocals?

axod• 17 years ago

"Everything else about pop music is highly synthesized and scientifically produced. Why not the vocals?"

I sense you think this is a bad thing... Are cars made by hand any more? Does being made by robots make a car any less fantastic?

brianto2010• 17 years ago

Actually, the vocals can be synthesized (sort of):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid

I said 'sort of' because the entry said "with specially recorded vocals of voice actors". It isn't completely synthesized.

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

Auto-Tune being abused: Why every Kanye West and T-Pain song sounds completely ridiculous.

It was kind of neat the first few times, now it's just annoying.

thomaspaine• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of a vocoder, not auto-tune.

thomasswift• 17 years ago

No he's thinking right. Vocoders usually sound a lot different. Kanye and T-Pain are using Auto-Tune.

pkaler• 17 years ago

When referring to Kanye West, I'm assuming you mean 808s and Heartbreaks. Auto-Tune was used as an instrument on that album. That's what the original article alludes too. The vocals are supposed to contrast with the super, lofi, YouTubeyness of the background music.

This completely the opposite of Kanye West's past work all the way back to Jay-Z's Blueprint album.

One big critique of Auto-Tune is that it kills emotion by making pitch too perfect.

You can't say this about 808s and Heartbreaks. The album sounds like nails on a chalkboard. And it's supposed to. The album was created in the context of him breaking up with his fiance and his mother dying.

You can call Kanye West a lot of things, but disingenuous is not one of them. The use of Auto-Tune wasn't meant to be disingenuous in this one particular case.

(I can't believe I just deconstructed a Kanye West album on Hacker News.)

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

Ok, fair enough. Every Kanye West song I've heard recently.

It's an interesting sound, it's just overused recently. There's basically two ways to use Auto-Tune: the intended way, cleaning up the pitch of vocals; and as a deliberate distortion effect, a la T-Pain / Kanye's recent songs. The latter produces a very distinct sound that gets old, fast.

mrtron3• 17 years ago

Listen to Kanye's last album - Graduation.

It entered my top 5 favorite rap album list, and I listen to a lot of rap. Maybe even number 1.

It is like a Pink Floyd album in terms of continual flow and quality, and I don't say that lightly.

I listened to his new album once and never again. It is great in terms of style, but trashed with the voice effects and over the top attempt at being 80's.

tricky7• 17 years ago

If you want to play with this, fire up GarageBand and check out the AUPitch effect. (make a real music track, then look in the track info, go to Vocal effects and try "Male Basic with pitch")

tricky7• 17 years ago

wait, no, it isn't AUPitch... There's a slider there that says, "enhance tuning" that is similar to auto-tune. sars.

michaelneale• 17 years ago

Yes - I used AutoTune in recordings back in 1999/2000 - it was available as a DirectX plugin even then (I was one of the rebels who used Ensoniq paris for its superior musical instrament like qualities, unlike the now dominant thug "pro tools") - even on low end processors then it was practical to do it almost real time (and in any case, often I would just draw the graph of where the notes were meant to be).

Once you did that a bit, you started to hear it everywhere. So I would put it at about 2000/1999 when I stopped hearing bum notes in pop songs on the radio.

As a fond example, listen to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers "under the bridge" - a MASSIVE hit in the early 90s, most of the notes are flat. Can you imagine that song being a hit like that now in that form?

GavinB3• 17 years ago

There's a fantasy out there that auto-tune makes you into a great singer. There's way more too it than that! The difference between great and poor singers is all about tone and emotion.

There's way more to making pop music sound perfect than Autotune. Every step of the way is expertly crafted to fit together. No one complains about how much studio editing respected bands like Radiohead do in the studio, so we are we complaining about silly pop acts?

And to all the people who say that music is in a "rut" need to get off their butts and actually put some effort in to find the great new music that they'll like. Yes, you have to actually try, not just whine that things aren't the same as they were back when you were coming of age.

Mainstream people listen to fun, accessible music. It's always been that way, so get over it! There's great music of every type being made right now, you just have to go look for it.

mattmaroon8• 17 years ago

Music is definitely in a rut and has been for years now. It's just part of the cycle. There is still good stuff being made, just as some companies prosper in a depression, but the overall industry is really stale.

It never stays that way for long though.

tricky7• 17 years ago

You are completely wrong. Music isn't in a rut. You are. Find someone who is into new music, ask some questions, borrow some albums, and really give it a chance. You'll be shocked at what you are missing just because you believe there's nothing good out there.

unalone8• 17 years ago

I just "discovered" Eminem. I've known he's existed for a long time, but I just realized how incredible his music is.

That's 4 years old now, yeah, but it's an example of how you might be missing what's going on right now. This year, for instance, Chumbawamba's The Boy Bands Have Won was an incredible folk tune album. Atmosphere's hip-hop album If Life Gives You Lemons, Paint That Shit Gold. Of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping did stuff I've never heard in pop before, even if it was a pretty inconsistent album overall. Fleet Foxes blew my mind last winter.

Last year, there was Streetlight Manifesto, half a good album by They Might Be Giants, Radiohead, Freezepop, Flight of the Conchords, Dr. Dog, Burial, Arcade Fire.

I can't think of a single year in the last 40 that didn't see major pieces of music come out. Every maligned era has had some incredible gems.

albertcardona• 17 years ago

I suggest an on-site visit to the DNA Lounge. Music as lively and as good as ever.

[The DNA Lounge also has web audio broadcasting]

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

It's been in a rut since ~1980. Obviously, arguing on the basis of opinion is tricky, unless people are willing to use a common metric, and have common overall tastes. People have a very, very bad habit of preferring music from their own youth. This is similar to the phenomena of almost always preferring the version of a song you hear first, even if there are lots of successful covers.

So it's hard to be objective. But let the people downmodding the OP consider some active bands from a year long before my birth, 1969 (off the top of my head):

  The Beatles
  The Rolling Stones
  Led Zeppelin
  The Doors
  CCR
  Hendrix
  Pink Floyd
  [Clapton was somewhere between cream and dereck and the dominoes]

...those are the major acts. Leaving out clapton, I would posit that each one of those groups is better than any group from the past 20 years. Disagree, fine, but to say that the overall culture was comparable is to leave yourself open to ridicule.

ADDENDUM: Here's a better list. The lineup for woodstock--ONE frickin' concert, which manages to leave out some of the best groups, like Zeppelin and the Doors and Bob Dylan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_Festival#Performing_a...

It's almost surreal how good that list is.

pjf• 17 years ago

BTW, Melodyne [1] does this plus some more jaw-dropping tricks.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFCjv4_jqAY

likpok• 17 years ago

Melodyne is pretty crazy. Some of the changes lead to weird results (if you jump to far with vocals), but still pretty cool.

ssharp• 17 years ago

I think the latest version Melodyne is absolutely amazing.

A lot of amateur composing/producing on computers is heavily restricted by a relatively basic set of tools. While the tools may have deeper option sets, hobbyists may take years to discover them. It's rare that a program comes along which allows you to have in infinite amount of sounds to choose from and allows anyone to think of creative ways to recycle existing recordings. When the program is as easy to use as Melodyne, it gives a lot of power to the amateur.

aston3• 17 years ago

Autotune is just another tool in the producer's toolkit. And by tool, I really mean instrument. Like any instrument, you can't just use it and automatically make a blockbuster hit. People have tried...

Good music is good music, no matter how it's made, and I have a lot of respect for someone like T-Pain who's basically single-handedly proved that Autotune can provide powerful emotional effect in songs. I also have no problem with helping pop stars sing better, on albums and in live performances. I prefer the best product for my bucks, if at all possible. I trust a producer like Rick Rubin to know when to employ what techniques to a record to maximize my enjoyment.

coglethorpe2• 17 years ago

What I found interesting is that it was the way the tool was used differently than the investor's intention that made it so popular.

parenthesis2• 17 years ago

That is not uncommon in the history of music technology.

For example, the Roland TB-303 "was originally marketed to guitarists for bass accompaniment while practicing alone" [Wikipedia]. But what we got from it — in the end — was acid house.

The vocoder was originally developed with telecommunications applications in mind, not Kraftwerk.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

That was embarrassing to read. Auto-tune is obvious and atrocious. The journalist in question has got to be tone deaf.

gabrielroth• 17 years ago

It sounds obvious when the settings are turned up really high and it's used as a pronounced, deliberately artificial effect, as in T-Pain and Kanye West and that one Cher song. Used at gentler settings, it can be almost completely transparent.

I'm willing to bet you've heard it used both ways, and on the first ones you've thought 'obvious and atrocious,' and on the others you haven't noticed it at all.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

I notice it on almost every top 40 song. It's absolutely shameful that a professional would need it as a crutch.

nandemo• 17 years ago

I don't understand why this comment and mattmaroon's are being downmodded. Perhaps music is one of the topics with which people identify too much? Like religion and politics.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Extremely cool stuff.

So -- looking at this and Melodyne (see other comment) let's extrapolate to see where the technology is heading.

It's Guitar Hero, except for real guitars. You and your friends play (hack) as best you can hit songs, along with vocals. The computer "adjusts" both the instrument and vocal performances to put you on-time and on-key.

Heck, I'd pay money for that. It'd be awesome.

kirse• 17 years ago

http://guitarrising.com/

wave• 17 years ago

You can hear it on the following video how Auto-Tune can make anyone sign like a pop star:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu6C70WROM

froo• 17 years ago

Oh great, yet another reason to hate the Oil Industry.

Without Autocorrelation there would be no Auto Tune. Without Auto Tune we wouldn't have to suffer the music of Britney Spears.

Andy Hildebrand.. you've just made my list sir.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

Does anyone developing a plug-in for the asterisk or other PBX or something? =)

Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect

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