Entries tagged “auto-tune”

Dedicated readers will recall me obsessing over and over-analyzing Auto-Tune in pop music earlier this year. It is, then, my pleasure to report that, thanks to the inestimable Sasha Frere-Jones, Auto-Tune analysis has gone legit. Behold, no less an authority than the New Yorker weighs in on Auto-Tune, especially T-Pain's (ab)use of it:

This, roughly, is what happens: Auto-Tune locates the pitch of a recorded vocal, and moves that recorded information to the nearest "correct" note in a scale, which is selected by the user. With the speed set to zero, unnaturally rapid corrections eliminate portamento, the musical term for the slide between two pitches. Portamento is a natural aspect of speaking and singing, central to making people sound like people. A nonmusical example of portamento would be "up-speak," a verbal tic common in some people under thirty. (Can you imagine the end of every sentence rising in pitch? Like a question?) Processed at zero speed, Auto-Tune turns the lolling curves of the human voice into a zigzag of right-angled steps. These steps may represent "perfect" pitches, but when sung pitches alternate too quickly the result sounds unnatural, a fluttering that is described by some engineers as "the gerbil" and by others as "robotic."

The gerbil.

Update: Now with audio! "Here Frere-Jones talks about how Auto-Tune has become a pop-music phenomenon, and demonstrates how it can transform the human voice, with the help of the music producer Tom Beaujour."

Now, I could have gone another week on Snoop's "Sensual Seduction", but I was a little under the weather, and as I understand it there is a rest of the world? Whatever. But here are some of the other key ideas we could have explored:

• Like "Cloverfield", "Sensual Seduction" features something of a motif of taping-over content as a framing device. In Cloverfield, it's not actually taping, but there is explicit recording over earlier material. In Seduction, it's explicitly a nod to VHS tape, but only the implicit suggestion of taping over something else. But as a common concept, there is something to be said about appropriation, shared recordings, and digital media. But what are Snoop and the Cloverfield monster trying to tell us?
• I alluded to the death of analog in the post about vocoder being replaced with Auto-Tune, but this seems like one of the underreported areas of the transition to digital. We talk about the analog hole in regard to DRM, but analog outputs also permit different kinds of manipulation for artist reasons -- techniques that exist in a different plane of consumption/creation than merely remixing.
• Do you think Billy Joel even knew what Auto-Tune was when he cranked that thing up to 11 before the Super Bowl?
• There's an outstanding remix of Sensual Seduction with the hook sung by Robyn, minus the vocoder manipulation. But really it's just another milestone in Robyn's march towards being the best pure-pop female performer in the world.
• Snoop seems to have singlehandedly snatched the is-he-or-isn't-he irony confusion crown from R. Kelly. Poor Robert's world-beating performance in "Trapped in the Closet" was undone by the fact that, by the time of the additions of Chapters 13 - 22, R. was in on the joke and therefore ruined the fun of watching the videos. Snoop is both ridiculous and completely sincere. Love it.
• Snoop name-checks Shawty Redd's "Drifter" as the song that inspired Sensual Seduction, and astoundingly even admits that his initial desire was to acquire the song outright. When rebuffed, Redd made a clone song, which wasn't even intended to feature Auto-Tune. And yet, despite having all the wrong instincts about marketing and producing this track, Redd's work still made its way into the lyrics of the song.
• And look ma, we made BuzzFeed for Auto-Tune Abuse! Actually, don't look, ma. (This week's topic actually inspired my mother to email me and tell me to stick to what I'm good at. Sorry, mom!)
• Finally, there's a whole slew of pop songs that are either completely or partially renamed for the commercial market when they are released as singles, as the result of the increasing willingness to use offensive terms in the titles of songs. Like 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake's "Ayo Pornography" becoming "Ayo Technology", "Sexual Eruption" became "Sensual Seduction". In addition to toning down the coarseness (We lose, for example, Snoop's explanatory declaration of "Orgasm." at the end of the song.), it changes the perception of the song, as Nelson ably noted in an email to me:

[W]hat amazed me is how the more explicit lyrics took a lot of charm out of the video for me. With the "Sensual Seduction" lyrics it had that charming goofy sexiness of the 70s pimp playa, a combination of sexy and yet a little harmless, like Smoove B. "Sexual Eruption", by contrast, felt harsh and crass to me, sort of unpleasant. Particularly when Snoop helpfully says the word "Orgasm", in case you were confused about by the "Eruption" metaphor.

They're saying the same thing, but a real lover seduces his girl, doesn't just slap his cock in.

I can add nothing to that.

• Pick up Snoop's Fyre Department Remix with Robyn
• Did you know they put All 22 Chapters of "Trapped in the Closet" on one DVD? Me neither.

As I had guessed, I've already had someone threaten to unsubscribe from my blog due to the publication of this week's Snoop Dogg research. But I've had twice as many people say that they loved it, so I won't let this blatant bullying censor this important work!

I'm not the only one who's boarded the Auto-Tune Express, though -- check out these great reactions from around the web. On Little Yellow Different, Ernie captures the conversation from when I first considered devoting my life this week to blogging about Snoop:

Ernie: i am honest to god speechless
Anil: i win! i think it's so special

Ernie: did they fucking put PCP in his weed?
Anil: no they put GENIUS in it.
Anil: this is why he's snoop dogg

Ernie: this is on level with ice cube starring in kids movies, except... completely not
Anil: right
Anil: cube went soft
Anil: like, eddie murphy soft
Anil: meanwhile snoop got even more real
Anil: he's like "yeah, i used to kill people. now look at my round bed in space."

And meanwhile, Des McKinney gets all academic with it -- fantastic! Check out Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music, where Des regales Hometracked readers with 10 examples of what he considers Auto-Tune abuse. I have to quibble with some of his findings; Songs like T-Pain's are about the deliberate, prominent use of the effect. But some of the other examples are so abominable and wondrous that you'll want to listen to the entire audio clip regardless.

A side note: The most amazing thing about the Ice Cube-as-sitcom-dad evolution we've discussed above is not that the Crazy Motherfucker Named Ice Cube is now Disney-ready, but rather that Snoop can get away with wearing these pimped-out 80s-style clothes! Indeed, Eazy E had called our Dre for exactly that kind of outfit, if I remember correctly. There was a mocking photo of Dre in a baby blue outfit, released sometime around that 5150 album where Eazy E had the Black Eyed Peas (!) join him in making a dystopian Christmas song about how horrible life is. Now Eazy's dead, Snoop's appropriating the look that used to be worth mocking, the Black Eyes Peas are making overwrought musical presidential endorsements, and Cube is Ward Cleaver. And Dre is still making beats. Who'da thunk?

Beginning with our exploration of Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction", we wandered into the history of vocoders, talkboxes, and the most nefarious of voice manipulation technologies, Auto-Tune.

But it's hard to express just how delightful horrible it can be when Auto-Tune goes wrong without actually diving into examples. Let's start with an obvious illustration. Rapper/singer Faheem Najm, who goes by the stage name of T-Pain, (see more on Wikipedia) has staked his entire career on vocals where he uses digital pitch correction to various degrees; This has opened him up to the completely accurate accusation that he can't actually sing.

You don't have to take my word for it -- there's a pretty good case made for the fact that T-Pain can't sing in this popular YouTube video, which is entitled T-Pain Can't Sing.

Sure, it's easy to pick on a relatively less established artist who's trying to cross over from rap to the world of R&B crooning. So let's pick on someone more deserving of our scorn, someone who's actually a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Billy Joel!

If you scroll in to about 20 seconds, his vocals on the National Anthem start sounding like he's auditioning to be T-Pain's backup singer. This performance clearly would have been vastly improved if Joel had simply inserted a transparent breathing tube into the corner of his mouth and insisted that he was opening up last year's Super Bowl game with an homage to the talkbox. Peter Frampton would understand.

One of the things that makes Snoop's "Sensual Seduction" video so compelling is his outstanding use of vocal effects. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

In the video, Snoop makes liberal use of a breath tube on his keytar, an obvious homage to the talkbox made (in)famous by Roger Troutman of Zapp fame. (If you don't know and love the funk, then you at least know Roger from the hook to Tupac's "California Love".) Snoop even even explicitly credits Troutman in an MTV interview, along with the much-more-obvious nods in the video to Prince and Rick James.

The thing is, "Sensual Seduction" doesn't use the talkbox, nor does it use a vocoder, which is a completely different instrument that often gets credit for the talkbox's outbut. The vocoder is an amazing instrument; There's an interesting background on the technology in this survey of milestones in electronic musical instruments, and the good folks at O'Reilly will even tell you how to make your own, if you're so inclined. I've been hoping for the vocoder and talkbox to return to the top of the pop charts for a solid decade now (ever since "California Love", really) and am somewhat chagrined that so much of the recent voice-distortion on pop singles is in the context of rather uninspired songs. But I digress.

Music today isn't made by connecting breathing tubes to home-built contraptions. Instead, commercial music is made in Digidesign's ProTools. ProTools is to commercial audio what Photoshop is to commercial design: Platform, product, and verb. And the first, and signature tool for performing pitch-correction on ProTools was Antares' Auto-Tune. The fun part is, now that we've entered this brave new world of digital distortion of vocals, Auto-Tune isn't just correcting pitch, it's being used to arbitrarily alter them.

You know the rest. Cher's "Believe"? Auto-Tune. Snoop's "Sensual Seduction"? Auto-Tune. And all of T-Pain's career? Auto-Tune. Now, it's possible that some producers are using other software to perform similar pitch-correction/pitch-manipulation duties; There are even free clones of Auto-Tune's functionality. But as often as not, the software that's become synonymous with the effect is the one that's responsible for the sound.

And so, another bit of analog sound-hacking makes way for its digital successor. Even if he's using the latest software, I gotta give props to Snoop for honoring the low-tech inspiration.

• Naturally, "Sensual Seduction" is available as an MP3 on Amazon.com
• You can also buy "California Love" over on Amazon, too. No iTunes links because DRM is wack.

I've written a lot more about Auto-Tune: Check out When Auto-Tune Strikes, about the fact that T-Pain can't sing, and Last of the Auto-Tune, which Gawker hailed as the "ultimate analysis" of this phenomenon.