Changing the tune

When you turn on Top 40 radio, it might seem like robots are performing the songs. Don’t be alarmed. While those are synthetic, digital voices you hear singing about love in the club and sexual double entendre, this is not that desolate future from “Terminator” where mechanical overlords hold sway. That robotic voice coming through the airwaves is only the magic of auto-tune.

Auto-tune uses the powers of science to pitch-correct singers into a usually noticeable warble. It is to music what Photoshop is to photography.

Auto-tune first came to prominence on Cher’s huge hit “Believe,” which should have been a sign from the beginning that it was destined for evil. It would be appropriate to name the plague of auto-tuning “Cher Syndrome” after the first person afflicted, much like Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The effect has grown in use recently, as pop artists from Rascal Flatts to Maroon 5 to Natasha Bedingfield have all called on its aid. T-Pain (or as I like to call him, “Everything That is Wrong with Modern Hip-Hop”) has embraced its use as his signature. Where producers once tried to deny and cover up its use, mainstream artists are now embracing it.

I’ve tried to be accepting of this “technique,” as music history is full of times when new instruments and devices were introduced into songs to revolutionize their genres.
In 1975, Kraftwerk introduced the vocoder, which generated synthesized speech. The Beatles’ breakthrough “Strawberry Fields Forever” utilized use of a mellotron that relied on playing pre-recorded tapes of an orchestra.

But instead of introducing new types of music, auto-tune has become a gimmick for some and a way for untalented to singers to release hit singles. Where once Kanye West may not have had the ability to croon on “Love Lockdown,” now that is no longer a problem. When a listener chooses an auto-tuned song, they are saying that there are other factors more important than the skill of the performer, like attractiveness or how well they can pop, lock and drop it.

Jim Anderson, professor of the Clive Davis department of recorded music at NYU, summed up the problem when he told Time, “There’s no shame in fixing a note or two, but we’ve gone far beyond that.”

I concede that this is pop music, and artistic integrity has never been the main concern. This is a genre where an emotionally tortured 45-year-old man could write a song in his basement and sell it to someone like Katy Perry to pass off as his or her own work.

What artists should understand is that sometimes the imperfection in a singer’s voice is what gives the song emotion and depth. Five Iron Frenzy frontman Reese Roper was notorious for his vocals being off-key, but the honesty and sincerity that would come from a performance meant so much more than anything an engineer could do in post-production. I’ll take that realness over Robotron 9000 any day.