Even halting singers sometimes hit the top of the charts, and it’s happening more often than than ever, thanks to Auto-Tune. The technology, which electronically alters the pitch of the human voice, severs the last link between pop stardom and old-fashioned vocal chops. Fortunately, the Auto-Tune wave may be cresting.
The technology first came to public attention a decade ago, via the intentionally distorted vocals on the Cher single “Believe.’’ Since then, the rapper T-Pain built a career on Auto-Tuning his voice to sound robotic. More insidiously, the technology has become a default tool in studios for its original purpose: touching up vocals so that everything is in tune. Good singers and bad ones alike can sound pitch-perfect.
There are signs of discontent with all the fakery. Rapper Jay-Z, for instance, recently released a song called “DOA (Death of Auto-Tune).’’ Meanwhile, pitch-correction technology is now available to everyone - for instance, on music software that Apple gives away. When everyone can sing with mechanical precision, the winners are those whose talent goes beyond hitting notes to evoking emotions through phrasing and timbre - in other words, people who can actually sing.
