The video explanation of this device is here.

Betcha didn't know it was invented by an oil prospector!

My daughter is a singer, and she finds listening to auto-tuned voices the equivalent of eating salt-free food. She's pointed it out so often that even I, tin-eared as I am, can now hear how it's killing individuality in music. I believe the market will sort it out, though.

Oil, huh? Maybe those people over at BP are as evil as they've been portrayed lately.

> I believe the market will sort
> it out, though.

Only in a manner of speaking. The software will improve.

At this point, the effect of autotune is deafeningly obvious to anyone who wants to listen for it. In a few years, the result of the process will be much more realistic. Unless the singer is naked in your living room, you'll never know it's happening.

It won't matter. Pop is all about cuddly-sex celebrity attraction anyway, not musical talent. That's not just cynicism: It's still a handsomely Darwinian cultural process. One reason to enjoy show business is that it's no less cruel in the fate it delivers to lesser players than most other parts of culture. Hats off to Simon Cowell: He's got a billion people convinced that his sixth-grader's talent show is the pinnacle of the human musical experience.

But it's about a hundred years too late to start complaining that musical skill is underrepresented at the top of the charts.

Can you imagine what something like that would do to Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" or anything by Janice Joplin? Ugh!

I think I might listen to MIX 107.3 (Baltimore-DC area) some time and see if I can spot the musical equivalent of Ted Turner's colorizing binge.

PAT BENATAR! PAT BENATAR WAS NOT AUTO-TUNED! BENATAR FOR PRESIDENT! Sweet.

Mrs. Geraldo (nee Benetar) is nice, but can't touch Ann Wilson.

Both are still on tour, though, occasionally, and don't miss them when they do!

@MPetrie98: "I think I might listen to MIX 107.3 (Baltimore-DC area) some time and see if I can spot the musical equivalent of Ted Turner's colorizing binge."

I always liked their station ID, where they said they were the best mix of everything. I'll believe that when they play some Led Zeppelin. I thought their morning show was cute, though, with one on-air personality to represent every target demographic.

You speak the truth, Radwaste. Ann Wilson sings with HEART!

And Milli Vanilli were run out of show biz for lip-synching!

> Benetar) is nice, but can't touch Ann Wilson.

Benatar had better thighs, which I admire in a pop star. (See above)

A little technical background: Pitch shifting has been part of pop music since about 1960. A guy named David Seville mastered the art of singing and speaking at half speed, and then playing back the tape at double speed so that the song was at normal tempo but an octave higher and with a peculiar shift in timbre... hence the Chipmunks. In the mid-1970s, a company called Eventide used what was then high-tech digital circuitry to invent a device that did the pitch shifting in real time. It was the first piece of digital technology to have an impact on the music industry.

The human voice is characterized tonally by a number of frequency response peaks and nulls, called "formants". Some formants change as you pronounce different vowels and consonants, but some are fixed by the shapes of the mouth, throat, and larynx. The problem with pitch shifting is that when it shifts the pitch, it shifts the formants too. So the person whose voice is being shifted no longer sounds like themselves once you go past two or three semitones in either direction. The industry's coined word for this is "munchkinization".

The Autotune folks (actually some researchers about five years ahead of them) developed some algorithms for detecting the formants and putting them back where they were after the pitch shift. The state of the art isn't quite there yet, though. If you listen closely, you can hear it: there's a "robot voice" effect that gets more prominent the more it shifts the voice away from its original pitch.

And yeah, use of it is near-universal in pop music these days. Let's face it, most of today's pop singers suck. But where the record labels are concerned, for the singers to actually be working on their singing is a waste of time. Singers don't spend days in the studio trying to get the perfect take anymore. They pop in, done one or two takes, and then it's up to the recording engineer to fix all the clams. (Which is ironic, considering that the process of "punching in", or re-recording a piece of a recorded track, is far easier today than it ever was with tape.) Between using Autotune in the studio and the now-accepted practice of lip-syncing "live" performances, singers never need to learn to sing.

Yes, the technology will improve and eventually the "robot voice" problem will be solved. I think we're a few years away from the time when most of our pop stars will be 3-D animated characters, voiced by unseen producers. (Which, now that I think about it, is not all that different from The Archies...)

I've always wondered if they used pitch-shifting on Madonna's voice.

Here's the most f***ed up use of Auto-Tune, though.

The Cirque de Soleil "Love" album redux of the Beatles' "Because" (Is that the title? "Because the world is round / It turns me on"). Amazing a capella harmonies.