Auto-Tune - Pop Music Gimmick

I've always hated the gimmicky pitch correction technology of the Auto-Tune software used in so much pop music these days. To me it's like raising a red flag of mediocrity. I've read somewhere that the first use of auto-tune was in 1998 in a Cher recording because she didn't have the vocal chops that the producer desired for that particular song. It didn't take long for auto-tuned vocals to appear all over the pop charts. It became a fad at the time but it had a freakish staying power.

There was a great article in Pitchfork that explained the development of the Auto-Tune software and it's inventor. It was a software package that would enable anyone to sing in tune and math was used to create vocal pitch correction to overcome bad singing. Over the years the software has become a voice processing plug-in for digital music products.

Somewhere along the way there were some artists who embraced Auto-Tune as a creative tool for voice manipulation. There have been some times over the years when I was OK with some sound effects applied to vocals that enhance the song in a very specific way but most of the time it seems to be used as a vocal style or correction to bad singing. It seemed to play out most in rap use where the artist becomes some kind of a vocal cyborg using Auto-Tune right from the start. The software is now used by most pop stars and has become the standard in the industry.

I cringe when I here that vocal effect in a song by almost anyone. I stopped listening to Top 40 pop music long ago and the auto-tuning of music has certainly increased my distain for the sound of radio. All vocals on today's radio are complex processed manipulations of the human voice with the soul completely wiped out. It would be nice for people going back to actually singing. At one point in 2010 Time magazine listed Auto-Tune as one of the top 50 worst inventions of the modern era. LOL. Auto-tune use is not real singing. It also sounds very dated.

There has been manipulation of sound ever since recording music was created and one could argue that double tracking, reverb, phasing, echo, and amplification is not really different from using Auto-Tune. Well, they can argue all they want but for me I'll pass on singers using that music software and would love to see someone just sing into a mic without all that fake voice processing.

With all that said... I do think there is a time and place in the music creative process for using Auto-Tune judiciously to create certain effects but overall it has been used to the extreme to eliminate the soul and blues elements out of popular music. I may be showing my age here but to me it's not rock 'n' roll. 

Pitchfork article from 2018... How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music. Very pro Auto-Tune.