Undoubtably you have heard the term Auto-Tune and it’s implementation in just about every song in the last two decades. (to both obvious and not-so-obvious effect) Thanks to performers like T-Pain and Kanye West who’ve made a career out of using this vocal effect, it has become considered the norm in mainstream music today. But did you know that Auto-Tune was created by a research scientist who worked in the oil industry? Do you know when Auto-Tune first began to be used in the music industry and by who? And do you know what the original purpose of Auto-Tune was? (hint technically how it is used today by almost every artist, especially in rap is incorrect)
Auto-Tune was invented by Dr. Andy Hildebrand, a research engineer employed in the oil industry. Long before inventing Auto-Tune, the mathematician Dr. Andy Hildebrand made his first fortune helping the oil giant Exxon find drilling sites. Using fabulously complex algorithms to interpret the data generated by sonar, his company located likely deposits of fuel deep underground. Alongside math, though, Hildebrand’s other passion was music; he’s an accomplished flute player who funded his college tuition by teaching the instrument. In 1989, he left behind the lucrative field of “reflection seismology” to launch Antares Audio Technology, despite not being entirely certain what exactly the company would be researching and developing. The next, surprisingly even bigger breakthrough, came when he tweaked auto-correlation to pitch-correct music. In 1996, Antares Audio Technologies and their Auto-Tune software were born.
The first song that hit the airwaves with Auto-Tune was Cher’s “Believe” single, and since then the recording industry has never been the same. It happened exactly 36 seconds into the song—a glimpse of the shape of pop to come, a feel of the fabric of the future we now inhabit. The phrase “I can’t break through” turned crystalline, like the singer suddenly disappeared behind frosted glass. That sparkly special effect reappeared in the next verse, but this time a robotic warble wobbled, “So sa-a-a-ad that you’re leaving.” Now just about any popular track you listen to has been auto-tuned to some effect. Sometimes it’s used to fix a missed piano note, and other times to pitch correct an entire song.
The pitch-correction technology Auto-Tune had been on the market for about a year before “Believe” hit the charts, but its previous appearances had been discreet, as its makers, Antares Audio Technologies, intended. “Believe” was the first record where the effect drew attention to itself: The glow-and-flutter of Cher’s voice at key points in the song announced its own technological artifice—a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal for the vague religiosity of the chorus, “Do you believe in life after love?” The song’s producers, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, tried to keep secret the source of their magic trick, even coming up with a cover story that identified the machine as a brand of vocoder pedal, that robotic-sounding analog-era effect widely used in disco and funk. But the truth seeped out. Soon after Auto-Tuned vocals were cropping up all over the music industry in R&B, dancehall, pop, house, and even country.
The expressed goal of Antares at its inception was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. “When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost,” the original patent asserted sweepingly, seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where “wrong” has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion. That is exactly how Auto-Tune has worked in the preponderance of its usage. Some speculate that it is featured in 99 percent of today’s pop music.
Nowadays, the technology has advanced and has become a sound of its own. Artists today are using the technology as a way to hide their singing abilities, and as an overall effect to create a more melodic sounding vocal performance. However, this is not the way the Auto-Tune technology was originally intended to be used. Beginning with T-Pain, who has been on record saying that he first began using Auto-Tune as a way to manipulate his voice to use it more as an instrument and bend his voice in unnatural ways, Auto-Tune has become popularized in the music industry today.
Available as stand-alone hardware but more commonly used as a plug-in for digital audio workstations, Auto-Tune turned out to have unexpected capacities. In addition to selecting the key of the performance, the user must also set the “retune” speed, which governs the slowness or fastness with which a note identified as off-key gets pushed towards the correct pitch. Singers slide between notes, so for a natural feel there needed to be a gradual transition. Hildebrand stated, “When a song is slower, like a ballad, the notes are long, and the pitch needs to shift slowly. For faster songs, the notes are short, the pitch needs to be changed quickly. I built in a dial where you could adjust the speed from 1 (fastest) to 10 (slowest). Just for kicks, I put a ‘zero’ setting, which changed the pitch the exact moment it received the signal.” It was the fastest settings that gave birth to the effect first heard on “Believe” and which has subsequently flourished. At the speediest retune settings, the gradual transitions between notes that a flesh-and-blood vocalist makes are eliminated. Instead, each and every note is pegged to an exact pitch, fluctuations are stripped out, and Auto-Tune forces instant jumps between notes.
Over the ensuing years, Antares have refined and expanded what Auto-Tune can do. Most of the new features have been in line with the original intent, hence functions like “Humanize,” which preserves the “small variations in pitch” in a sustained note, and “Flex-Tune,” which retains an element of human error. Some of Auto-Tune’s sister products add “warmth” to vocals, increase “presence,” intensify breathiness. The freaky-sounding Throat EVO maps the vocal tract as a physical structure, just like Hildebrand mapping the oil fields miles underground. This phantasmal throat can be elongated or otherwise modified allowing the user to literally design your own new vocal sound.
All of this is Antares supplying a demand that it had never originally imagined would exist. The real impetus came, as always, from performers, producers, engineers, and beyond. If the general populace had uniformly recoiled from the Cher effect, or from its recurrence half-decade later as the T-Pain effect, if Lil Wayne and Kanye West had reacted like Jay-Z and spurned the effect rather than embraced it as a creative tool, it’s unlikely that Antares would be catering to the appetite for vocal distortion and estrangement.
Auto-Tune has taken on a life of its own, becoming a production staple in the worlds of R&B and pop. US rapper T-Pain is now synonymous with the studio technique, inspiring the likes of Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and Kanye West to follow suit.
However, controversy has also followed, with music lovers and performers leading a backlash against a tool that can make singers sound pitch perfect when they are nothing of the sort. In 2009, Jay-Z issued ‘D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)’ stating it was time to ditch the technology. However, fortunately or unfortunately, Auto-Tune seems to be here to stay. The younger up and coming generation of artists don’t know another sound other than the popularized Auto-Tune sound. This is what they are used to, this is what all of their favorite artists use, and this is what they see as the sound to get them famous. Whether you are a fan of the Auto-Tune sound or not, you have to admit without it, one could argue that a portion of the artist we see in main stream music today would not be here. (or at least not be as popular, or wouldn’t be close to sounding the same as we know them today) As an engineer myself, I don’t necessarily see Auto-Tune as a bad thing, mostly because when working with singers it makes an engineers job easier, but I also don’t see it as a good thing either. Way too many artists (especially new ones) just want their vocals drowning in this effect to the point where you can barely understand what they are saying and only hear the effect. When used correctly (or even properly for example in the cases of T-Pain, Kanye West, Migos) it can add an incredible amount to the record and the artist’s performance on the record. However, when used in correctly (either because the artist and/or engineer doesn’t understand fully how to use the effect properly) it can be a major hinderance on the record.
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