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Friday, Jul. 30, 2010 | 11:57

autotune assessment

in that past couple weeks i've had a couple conversations about AutoTune and its use in pop music. less it's use as pitch-correction software and more it's use as a vocal effect. i seem to have gone full circle on the topic.

it began with an m.i.a. song from her new album // / Y /. she stretches autotune to the point that it distorts her voice, which suggests that she intends it as an effect. she doesn't go overboard, but that may be what annoys me. it only shifts her vocals some of the time, bending her notes at the end of lines or in more emotive places. something about the inconsistency of the effect bothers me. it's one thing to sing a song through a vocoder, so your voice is distorted throughout, but another to have it distort only here and there. that bugs me.

the first conversation was about the m.i.a. song and how using the effect would date it. eventually this autotune fad will end and people will move on. my friend agreed so we went on about how annoying the effect is. not a criticism of vocal ability, since that's never stopped rock singers before, but more a sonic nuisance that detracts from the song.

the second conversation also stemmed from the song, but in this case my partner took the opposite tack. she pointed out that cher's "believe" came out in 1998, making the use of autotune as an effect hardly a fad. that it seems to be more common today may be a false perception. the past ten years of music feel like a wasteland to me, so probably i missed things.

in this conversation we disagreed, and i continued to complain about autotune as an effect. she took the opposite side, saying it had its uses. frankly, i think she only said that autotune wasn't a problem, without going into detail about it. does that mean she's ok with it all the time? do certain things bug her? does she just accept it? does she tune it out (automatically, so to speak)? i don't know. i'm not even sure it's relevant.

two days later i heard an NPR podcast (from 2008) about how far autotune had come since that Cher recording. it included a review of kanye's use of autotune in his album 808's and Heartbreak. i hadn't heard it before, but the bits they played sounded great. they associated the effect on his voice with robotic speech and futurism, which immediately gave me the context i needed to appreciate the songs. i decided i liked it, and realized i'd have to revise my stance on autotune if i were to get the album.

so, while the minor twitches and pulls of autotune still bug me, the use as an overall effect, especially when pushed into consistent distortion, is pretty cool. i may not like rihanna using it on 'disturbia' or m.i.a. using it on her new album, but i think it has its place in music as a vocal effect.

now i wonder what it would sound like applied to out-of-tune instruments.

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