Auto-Tune
One of the great technological advances in the world of music has been digital editing. Years ago when I was in the recording studio, if I made a mistake, we would either have to do a whole new take and play the track over again, or the recording engineer would have to find the exact spot, play a snippet back and I would overdub the write notes where they belong. Now with digital editing corrections can be made, audience coughs can be erased, and sour notes can be fixed with the touch of a button.
For years a cutting edge software program called AutoTune has been used to polish up recordings for celebrities like Britney Spears and Madonna who really can’t sing in tune very well. The first time I heard Cher’s 1998 hit song “Do You Believe in Life After Love?” I could not believe how annoying the catch in her voice was, but I knew it must be something digitally recorded. What I did not realize at the time was that AutoTune was being used in a way it was never designed for. Rather than nudging the pitch up to the correct frequency to make sound it in-tune with the band, Cher’s voice was abruptly bumped up giving it that irritating blip.
Composers have used this kind of computer process for a few years already when Cher’s song came out. American Composer Roger Reynolds had used a similar early process or “phase vocoder” to perform time stretching of flute sounds in his composition Transfigured Wind. This work was composed 1983 when the field of computer music was in its infancy. Many processes like sound file editing that are available on almost any computer today were, at that moment in history, still experimental inaccurate and clumsy.
Since Cher’s hit, the misuse of the AutoTune software has become ubiquitous throughout the world of pop, country and hip-hop affecting recordings by the likes of Janet Jackson and Kanye West.
Pop music aside there is serious science behind AutoTune. Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune’s inventor, spent eighteen years in a field called seismic data exploration, a branch of the oil industry. He worked in signal processing, using audio to map the earth’s subsurface. His technique involved a mathematical model called autocorrelation. The layers below the earth’s surface could be mapped by sending sound waves—dynamite charges work nicely in unpopulated areas—into the earth and then recording their reflections with a geophone. As it happened, autocorrelation could detect pitch as well as oil, and Hildebrand, who had taken some music courses, turned his engineering skills toward pop.
Many thanks to David Edwards of New Mexico Tea company for providing refreshments. http://www.nmteaco.com/
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