You remember when Jay-Z tried to kill Auto-Tune? It doesn’t seem to have worked.
People don’t just want to Auto-Tune music. People want to Auto-Tune the news and their speaking voices. According to Digital Music News, Smule’s “I Am T-Pain” iPhone app “receives 10,000 app downloads per day.” When you speak through the app, your voice warbles musically like T-Pain’s. (After using it, I found that it works better on high, small voices than low, rumbly voices.) Though the app allows you to sing along with pre-recorded songs, the allure of the software seems to be less about an opportunity to make music than the Halloween effect of momentarily resembling a famous person.
Auto-Tuned songs, though, continue to come, which suggests that no matter how much people make fun of the software, they like something about what it does to voices. Jack White’s Third Man Records is releasing a vinyl 7-inch of “A Glorious Dawn,” an Auto-Tuned treatment of footage from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series that features an appearance by Stephen Hawking. Boswell initially uploaded the video to YouTube, but you can download various digital versions for free.
At the other end of the commercial spectrum is Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say,” the number three song in the country right now. (It was number one last week.) DeRulo’s vocals are heavily Auto-Tuned, though not to the distorted level of T-Pain. Confusingly, the song samples some vocals from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” which are digitally processed, though not with Auto-Tune. A Wikipedia page says that Heap’s vocals went through “a DigiTech Vocalist Workstation,” though it appears that she used a TC-Helicon VoiceLive unit. In this live performance, introduced by Zach Braff, you will see the VoiceLive pedal sitting on the top right of her keyboard. (Imogen Heap can play many other instruments, for those who want to follow Heap more closely.)
When I wrote about Auto-Tune last year, I suggested that the software has three main uses: performing mundane fixes on all kinds of bum notes, perfecting the human singing voice in an imperceptible way, and distorting that voice in a very perceptible way, in the way that many studio effects have over the years. Auto-Tune performs tasks that have been carried out by other studio tools for years, though it does have its own sonic quality.
It’s that second use that gets depressing, no matter how pragmatic you are about the demands of pop music. Not only does Auto-Tune push various voices towards a single, anonymous mean, it eliminates weaknesses that can be strengths. This clip of Robyn performing “Be Mine!” recorded recently at the offices of Cherrytree Records shows a talented singer working without a net, singing about a longing that isn’t going to satisfied and isn’t going away. Fed through any number of devices, Robyn’s performance would reveal some inconsistencies in pitch. Would you rather hear it tweaked or the way it is right here?
“Whatcha Say” is sung by a cute twenty-year-old boy apologizing for his infidelity. Derulo is going for vulnerable and contrite, qualities that tend to work on the charts for cute twenty-year-old men. Although it is possible that Derulo can’t sing at all, such people are not generally signed to major labels. The Derulo who sang into the software likely sounds just fine without it. In a song where he’s supposed to be feeling some measure of pain, it might help to hear some and cracks in his voice. He’s got Imogen Heap’s lovely hook holding the song up (which confuses matters by being harmonized, though Heap needs no help singing in tune), so Derulo has plenty of room to sound human. Instead, he sounds like 2009. Derulo’s case is not enough to worry anyone, especially Jay-Z. Another decade of Derulos, though, would be vexing, much more so than a decade of T-Pains. T-Pain never seemed worried about sounding human, and his app can’t worry.
