Quezi

Photo by Julián Rodriguez Orihuela - CC-BY

If you listen to records from the 50s and 60s you’ll find that the vocal pitch is often way off. But listen to modern pop music and it’s usually perfect pitch. What changed?

Truly great singers like Bob Dylan never worried too much about whether they were singing on-key or not, but masses of aspiring artists think it’s important – and a few duff notes can spoil a concert. It’s now possible to do something about singing off-key, and performers are making use of the technology.

The electronic wizardry is a piece of software called Auto-Tune, developed by Andy Hildebrand and sold through Antares Audio Technologies. For as little as $400 (or under $100 for a basic version) you can get a piece of software for PC or Mac that adjusts every sung note to its perfect pitch.

Auto-Tune is found in just about every recording studio, but for many years the performers and producers tried to keep its use a secret. If a performer flubbed a note or two during a recording session, it was no problem – the duff notes could be fixed up during editing later. And if Auto-Tune’s parameters were set carefully, no-one would know that it wasn’t the singer’s natural voice.

The most important parameter is the retune speed – the time it takes Auto-Tune to glide the note to its perfect pitch. For maximum realism, the retune speed must be set to a value close to the retune speed of the singer’s natural voice.

Auto-Tune is widely used for live concerts too. No longer does the performer need to worry about missing a note or two: the audience will never hear the dud notes.

But Auto-Tune’s retune speed can be set to any value right down to zero, which means that notes instantly jump to the exact pitch. This effect is decidedly un-natural. If the singer glides smoothly from one note to another, Auto-Tune will suddenly jump from one note to the next when the mid-point between them is reached. And this effect, too, is un-natural. Here’s a great Auto-Tune spoof video illustrating the available effects.

In 1998, Cher exploited this effect in her song Believe, and the world soon worked out that Auto-Tune was generating the vocal effects. The next artist to use Auto-Tune so blatantly was T-Pain with songs like Buy U a Drank, and he was so successful that the technique is now widely copied.

Used subtly or blatantly, Auto-Tune is now a way of life for professional singers. We may no longer hear sharp or flat notes from professional singers, but nor may we ever hear the likes of Dylan again.