The Friday Fillip: Auto-Tune

Pitch is important in music. Maybe that’s why the sound of the orchestra tuning up was George III’s favourite part of the concert. And while it’s fairly easy for musicians to come together over the oboe’s A, singers can’t “set it and forget it.” Vocal intonation is a version of eye-hand coordination, although in this case it’s the ear-larynx combo that’s key. Of course, there are those who have absolute (or “perfect”) pitch and can simply know which note is being played or sung with the same ease that you exhibit when you know without thought that you’re looking at yellow or pink. (There’s a mystery here for me, because tones don’t come into this world with labels: A, C#, E, etc. So there’s an element of learning here… But that’s for another day, perhaps.)

So what to do with the poor singer whose intonation… wanders? Now, of course, the answer is digital: auto-tune. Ever since the inimitable Cher graced the aural world with Believe in 1998, auto-tune has been on hand to herd the wavering voice on to the righteous path, firmly and often quite… abruptly. And ever since that moment, there have been those who embraced this electrical laryngeal corset and those who loathe and scorn its use.

To give you a sense of what it can do to the human voice, let me offer you a few moments with one of its champions, T-pain. Here is an a capella version of his music with all of the auto-tune “cyber warbles” front and centre. (Note the lyric, if you get that far, “condo in Toronto”, by the way.)

[ Hah! It looks as though T-pain’s people have had the video pulled off YouTube. I like to think that the Fillip was responsible.]
http://youtu.be/iNKQ-qcRLZk

But everybody’s doing it now. Well, not everybody, but a whole lot of singers sneak it in to their recordings to fix bum notes or just to… make it “perfect.” And a recent series of three articles (1, 2, 3) in the New York Times, asks provocatively, “Really Now, What’s So Bad about Auto-Tune Pop?” The columns are filled with YouTube illustrations of its use, and it offers a handy ride down the main street of recent(ish) pop, in case you’ve let your membership in Tunesland slip recently.

For me, though, the beauty of auto-tune is the opportunity it gives to humorists. To see what I mean, check out the video below, in which Morgan Freeman and a bunch of physicists — Feynman, Hawking, Cox, Kaku, Close — sing their hearts out about sub-atomic particles.

I’m already working on causing various jurists to sing the law. Can you imagine the improvements in legal education this could bring about?