AutoTune

Quora Answer : Do you think the trend in noticeably auto-tuned vocals in popular music will soon become passe? Will they become a kind of time-stamp for this moment in studio production?

Jun 15, 2020

No.

I think it's here to stay.

Think of autotune as the equivalent of distortion for electric guitars.

Distortion started as a gimmick. Distortion was hated by musical purists in the same way vocal processing is hated by purists today. But autotune, just like guitar distortion, makes possible entirely new sonic worlds and genres of music.

In particular autotune is highly culturally relevant to us today, when we are starting to see, and to fear, the synthesis of humans and machines. Angst about autotune reflects our wider angst about ArtificialIntelligence, our worries that humans are "too dependent" on our machines. Fears that we are becoming incapable of acting independently of them. That we're merging into them.

What can illustrate that drama better than the human voice, the most fundamentally "human" part of music, allowing itself to become roboticised thanks to autotune and vocoding? And the computer sound becoming more human and animal-like thanks to formant filters etc?

Autotune is as fundamentally the sound of now, as electric guitars were the sound of the 60s and 70s. And everything you than think of to say AGAINST autotune, people were saying against electric guitars back then.

Quora Answer : What musical instrument can replace a rapper?

May 15, 2020

No instrument is an exact replacement for the human voice. Because the voice has a special place in music, representing a human.

Perhaps rap as we currently understand it will go out of fashion and be replaced by singing again.

I personally would say that even in hip-hop there's a new style of vocalization evolving which is somewhere between rapping as traditionally understood and singing. It's already replacing "old-skool rap" of the kind that came out in the 80s and flourished through to the 2010s. This cloud-rap / trap / future soul style of what I call "auto-croon" is taking over the world. (Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to Can you sing and rap simultaneously? Are there any artists that do this?)

But no abstract instrumental sound is going to replace the human voice.

Quora Answer : Why do people like lots of autotuned weird rap songs?

Aug 11, 2020

First, for people to really understand this question, and all the talking about "autotune".

You have to understand that autotune is NOT just to correct pitches that are off.

I mean, popular music uses autotune to fix out of tune singing, of course. But the technology exists to do this completely unobtrusively. You wouldn't notice autotune if it was just about correcting the notes being sung.

No. Autotune is used BECAUSE it gives you that "weird" half-robotic sound. Actually a "not very tuneful" sound. And people like it.

Now here's my pet theory.

Think about Manga comics, where all the characters have big eyes. Those eyes don't look "realistic". They are, when you think about it, an "artificial" distortion. Nevertheless they resonate with something hardwired into the human visual system which notes that eye-size to face-size ratio is higher in babies.

Large eyes make characters look younger and more vulnerable and triggers a dose of emotional engagement. Giving cartoon characters unrealistically and artificially large eyes is a cheap trick that makes their emotions feel stronger and more dramatic. And helps the reader engage with them.

Now I think "weird autotune" actually does the same thing. Soul singing had already been on this trajectory for a while ... pure melodic singing was losing out to a range of sighs and moans. I continuously point out Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" a foundational record in soul history. There's no doubt that Gaye could sing beautiful melodies. But on Sexual Healing it's just a kind of tuneless, crooning, orgasmic moan.

That's the point. Too much explicit melody in singers sounds "mannered" and detached from the emotions they are meant to portray. People who are really overcome with emotion don't have the control to hit precise notes, their voice cracks and sobs and becomes tonally monotonous.

And I think that is what autotune is accentuating.

Autotune is not adding tunefulness to singers. Quite the opposite, it's almost taking it away ... compressing the pitch movements down to a mono-tone warble. But that is a cheap, artificial trick, that our brains key in to, that signifies strong emotion. The glitches are like little sobs and catches at the back of the throat. The monotone conveys "loss of control" and therefore "this guy really feels it".

Just as Manga eyes are unnaturally large, but nevertheless by making the character seem immature, makes them more emotionally engaging. So autotune is a cheap mechanical trick to make the singer sound like an infant crying, and therefore creates a similar emotional response.