Auto-Tune

Symphony of Science – We Are All Connected (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

We Are All Connected was made from sampling Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The History Channel’s Universe series, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos and the Powers of 10.

MP3 available at http://www.symphonyofscience.com. Read more…

Carl Sagan – A Glorious Dawn ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

This video remixes footage from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. Read more…

Antares’ Auto-Tune is hated by many, but it’s, arguably, the most influential audio effect of our time.

With D.O.A., Jay-Z writes the obituary for Auto-Tune, saying “you rappers singing too much, get back to rap, you T-Paining too much.”

When Jay-Z’s rapping about an audio effect plug-in, you know it’s gone mainstream.

D.O.A. is free of the usual trappings of modern hip-hop – drum machine beats, samples and Auto-Tuned vocals – and it sounds pretty fresh, as a result.

What do you think? Is Auto-Tune D.O.A? Read more…

Synthtopia regular and fellow blogger Torley demonstrates how AutoTune EFX works, delivering a few jolts of audio pain and fun along the way.

via Torley

Frieze Magazine has published a article that takes a contrarian look at the musicality of Auto-Tune.

Author Jace Clayton first recognizes the fact that many musicians hate AutoTuned vocals:

Vocal purists hate Auto-Tune. They hear in its robotic modulations some combination of sugar-rush novelty, bulldozed nuance, jejune synthetics, loss of ‘soul’, disdain for innate vocal talent, teen-optimized histrionics, emotional anemia, and/or widespread musical decline. It’s ugly.

Discussing US R&B singer T-Pain’s Auto-Tune-aided hits in 2007, music critic Jody Rosen declared that, ‘T-Pain represents a kind of symbolic severing of African-American music from its traditional emotionalism […] the impassioned melismas that have powered black popular singing for decades are smoothed into synthetic gasps.’

Clayton goes on, though, to suggest that Auto-Tune is leading to a Man-Machine hybrid vocal style:

In an era of powerful computers that allow one to audition all manner of effects on vocals after the recording session, recording direct with Auto-Tune means full commitment. There is no longer an original ‘naked’ version. This is a cyborg embrace. In Cyborg Manifesto (1991), Donna Haraway notes that ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.’ Auto-Tune’s creative deployment is fully compatible with her ‘argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.’

What do you think? Are there artists that you think are using Auto-Tune to create cyborg art?