tuning

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?

Time magazine published an article earlier this week that looks at Auto-Tune and its use in popular music. 

Buried in the article, though, the mass-market future of Auto-Tune is revealed:

T-Pain and Auto-Tune’s parent company are finishing work on an iPhone app.

“It’s gonna be real cool,” says T-Pain. “Basically, you can add Auto-Tune to your voice and send it to your friends and put it on the Web. You’ll be able to sound just like me.”

Asked if that might render him no longer unique, T-Pain laughs: “I’m not too worried. I got lots of tricks you ain’t seen yet. It’s everybody else that needs to step up their game.”

Yep – now everybody with an iPhone will be able to create their own version of T-Pain classics, like I’m In Love Wit A Stripper. 

There are now hundreds of iPhone music applications. Few of them are more than sample-based gimmicks, and it’s rarer still for an iPhone music app to be a really interesting musical tool. 

Does the world really need an iPhone Auto-Tune app?

Researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience believe that the use of 12 tone intervals in music is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech. According to their research, the notes traditionally used in tonal music sound “right” to our ears because of the way our bodies make sounds used in language.

When the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, according to Dale Purves, Professor for Research in Neurobiology.

The researchers tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music. The speech sounds produced by different speakers and languages produce the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios, Purves said.

The lowest two of these vocal tract resonances, also known as formants, account for the vowel sounds in speech. “Take away the first two formants and you can’t understand what a person is saying,” Purves said.

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