Stuff You Should Know - How Auto-Tune Works

Episode Date: August 11, 2015

What began as a challenge to an oil engineer to make a terrible singer into a pitch-perfect one, Auto-Tune has become a ubiquitous (and, to many, obnoxious) part of the musical soundscape. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yep. There's Jerry.

Yep. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That was great. Thanks, man. Do I sound like Cher? Yeah, you sound like T-Pain, T-Josh, T-Josh. Or Snoop Dogg. Does he do auto tune?

He factors into this big time later on. Oh, wow. I don't even know about that. Oh, I've got something up my sleeve. This is kind of fun. I don't know how much we're going to do that because people are probably like, stop it right now. Oh, Chuck, I think we should do it a lot.

Are you done? Yeah, I'm done. All right. We could have just auto tuned this whole thing. Yeah. You know? Maybe we should. Maybe we should.

Maybe from this moment forward we should just auto tune the rest of the episode. Yeah. Starting now. Let's sabotage our careers. You got an intro for this? A fancy intro? I think we just did it, buddy. Oh, OK.

Well, let's get in the way back machine then, my friend. OK. We don't have to go back that far because I know where we're going. It's going to be a short trip. Let's go back to, oh, summer of 1998. Boom. I'm, you and I are in the club. We're hanging out.

We're drinking rum and coke. You can find us in the club. And we're dancing. We're getting down and grooving to Cher's latest jam. Believe. Believe. It's a hot jam. A hot, hot, hot jam that's released in the summer.

Summer time, as you can tell, because it's hot in the club. Yeah. And I've got on my short pants. I'm dressed like I'm out for a night at the Roxbury. That's right. I'm wearing a see-through mesh shirt. So I noticed, actually. How did you not?

Well, yeah, the third nipple really stands out. So we're in the club. We're jamming and Cher's song is on. And something happens at about 35 seconds into the song. And you and I are just like, whoa, daddy, did you just hear that? It changed everything. It changed the whole tone of the club. Like, the club was like, OK, now it's bangin' happenin'.

Yeah, the hook. Yeah. Because of a little something called autotune. What sounded like a little electronic glitch was very purposeful. And it was the first time the autotune had been used in this way. So what, Josh, is autotune? Well, that was quite a setup. Can we do the rest of the episode in the club?

Yeah, why not? OK. Just keep those rummins coming. OK. That's cool. So, Chuck, let me stop you for a second, right? OK. Because the way you described it, you made it sound like everybody was like, oh, Cher

just used autotune. No, no. No. Everybody said, what was that? Yeah. That was awesome. Although, some people were like, what was that? Don't ever do that again.

Sure. But most people were like, wow, Cher just released her biggest hit of her entire career. And it was a pretty long career. Yeah. She just came back. Like, that just established her comeback was this track. Yep. And it actually became one of the greatest best-selling singles of all time.

Yeah. And I think, I mean, it would have been probably a big song anyway. But I think most definitely autotune kicked it into the stratosphere. It gave it just that extra something. Deadman, it became part of the talk, everyone was talking about it. So everybody went to her producer and said, dude, how did you do that? We want to know how to do that. And he's like, vocoder.

Yeah. He lied. He lied. He lied big time. He lied in person to other producers. He lied in interviews. He lied, lied, lied about how he made that track because he wanted to keep it to himself. Because it was so huge.

And it became so huge, Chuck, that at first autotune was called The Share Effect. Even the company that produced autotune, Antares, which we'll talk about in a minute, called it in their instructional book, The Share Effect. They probably still do, don't they? They don't mention it any longer. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay.

So it was a huge deal. And this guy lied and kept it under wraps. And for many years, it was very mysterious. Yeah. I mean, if you live under a rock, well, let's go ahead and play that clip of the very first 35 seconds into that song where Share says, I can't break through. You keep pushing me inside and I can't break through. There's no talking to you.

Yeah, right there. Boom. Right there. Music changed from that point forward. Okay. So for the worse. What this guy, what her producer was saying was vocoder. Vocoder is something that's been around for a very long time.

If you've ever listened to any Pete Frampton, Peter Frampton, and he sings, Do You Feel Like We Do? Yeah. That whole long guitar solo or whatever. He's breathing into a tube connected to his guitar, which is electrifying his voice. Vocoder been around for a very long time. Yeah. But there's different ways of doing it.

That was definitely the tube effect through the guitar, but you can also just use it to make your voice robotic like Beck, two turntables and a microphone, or Mr. Roboto with sticks. All different ways to use it. This thing, this sounded different. This share effect. It was a little different. And I wonder how this guy talked his way out of the lie. The lie?

Yeah. I mean, if a producer is like, okay, well show me how you did it on vocoder. If he was like over here and then just like ran out of the room. I don't think he talked his way out of it. I think he's just another lying music producer. Okay. And he was just like, oh, okay. Well, busted.

Okay. So, apparently along the way, people figured out here, there, what this guy did in 1998 with Believe, and they started using it themselves, but very, very sparsely. All right. So, Josh, what is Autotune? All right. I'll answer your question because I'm going to keep asking it. All right.

Autotune is a plugin originally released in 1997 for the audio editing software Pro Tools. Yeah. It's a software piece that allows you and the original intent and how it's still mostly used is to pitch correct a singer's voice. Right. So, when you or I go into the studio to record those albums that we'll never release, but we just record for fun. We hit flat notes here or there.

Oh, not me. I have perfect pitch. I hit flat notes here or there. I don't. Perfect pitch. And everybody does. It's a normal thing. Sure.

For most of eternity, music producers would say blue eyes, chairman, I need another take. That was a great take, but you had a couple of flat notes. Give me another take just like that one. Then Frank would finish his scotch, put out a cigarette, and say, you get one more. Clean head. What was the joke? Oh, you didn't even see spinal tap, did you? Yeah.

You finally saw it? Finally. Oh, okay. But I don't remember any Frank Sinatra jokes. Yeah. That was when Bruno Kirby is the limo driver. He's talks about Sammy Davis' book, Yes, I Can, and he says what they should have called it is, Yes, I Can, as long as Frank says it's okay, because Frank called the shots for

all those guys. I do remember that. So Frank would sing one more take, and this could be like take 12 or 15 or 20, depending on how much the person was feeling it, the singer was feeling it at the time, and would be happy to hang around the studio, whatever was keeping the singer there at the studio. As long as that was around, the singer was happy to give it one more try, one more try, right? Like drugs?

Maybe. Okay. Or if they had like a really good candy bowl. Sure. I've got to stay for the Skittles. So the editor then, or the music producer would then take all of these different tracks and would go through, and I can't imagine how awful this would be, take the best part of this track and edit it together with the best part of that track.

And like we're talking like pre-digital errors, so like they're splicing together tape from what I understand. Yep. Right? To get the best possible complete take pieced together from two different takes. Yeah. Right. So okay, that's what they did.

All of a sudden in 1997, there's this new software that just runs through a take and says, oh well I see what note or what key the singer is singing in, but this particular note is just a little out, so I'm going to nudge it into the key that the singer was going for, and now all of a sudden one take is all it takes. Yeah. I mean what it did was it cut down on studio time, which is super expensive, which is very appealing because now you could churn out songs that are a more rapid rate and a cheaper rate, and it was a little sort of a secret tool that they didn't intend to like get out

to the public. I don't think they wanted everyone to know this stuff. No, it was meant for professionals. Yeah. I think it was the musical audio equivalent of cosmetics. Yeah. It was invented by Dr. Harold Andy Hildebrand, and he likened it to makeup, and the New Yorker likened it to like getting rid of a red eye in a photograph.

Exactly. It was just, you use it just enough so that you can't tell it's there, but it makes for a more pleasant overall composition, right? Yeah. What Cher had done, or what Cher's producers had done, is take this thing and use it to the nth degree. Yeah. Supposedly it was just a joke, and Cher was like, I love that, but that's like, I don't

know if that's an urban legend or if that's fact. Well, from what I read that her producer, she wanted like, she had heard like some telephone effect that she was interested in using, like she wanted something, and I guess the producer had stumbled upon that and played it for her, but it was like, you're not going to like this, but listen to this weirdness, and she was like, I want that. Nice. That's what I read. Well, if it's due to her giving it the green light, then that was truly like foresight,

like a masterful move by Cher, you know? Well, Cher has a lot of foresight. You know what they say, don't doubt Cher, and Cher has a lot of foresight. Never bet against Cher. So when she did make that decision, it changed, like you said, it changed everything. And we'll, we can't talk enough about this, but we're going to take a break and then come back and talk more about it. Right after this.

Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

I'm Mangesha Tickler, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. All right, Josh, what I found most interesting about this while researching was what Andy Hildebrand did before he did this. He was a musician. He played flute professionally since he was a young teenager, even went to University of Illinois, fighting Illini. On a music scholarship, yet he chose to work for Exxon Mobile for 17 years looking for oil.

Yeah. Crazy. The two weren't too terribly far apart, right? Well, as we will find out. So he's a professional floutist, classically trained floutist, a good one from what I understand. Floutin' his flute. Yes. And he went to college to get an electrical engineering degree, I think.

And basically, when he went to work for the oil companies, it was an oil exploration. And he figured out a program or he designed a software that when you set off an explosive charge underground, it measured the pitch of stuff, of the sound waves that were created, right? That's right. So as they travel through rock, different types of rock adjust the pitch, basically. And this software analyzed the pitch that was coming through and could create a subsurface map of the rock below.

And oil companies have long known that this type of rock is associated with oil and this type of rock is not. Maybe you'll find natural gas in this type of rock. So with this guy creating an audio visual map of the subsurface area, oil companies no longer had to just drill and drill and hope that they found oil. He would say this is a pretty great place to drill because this kind of rock is there. That's right. It's called Auto Correlation and it saved Exxon a lot of money and he somehow made

a lot of money. I thought it was going to be one of those things where Exxon was just like, thanks, you work for us. Joink. Here's your $45,000 a year. But apparently he earned enough money to retire by the age of 40 thanks to this innovation. And in the early 1990s, he got out of the oil business and found it. It's like it's just a popularity contest.

He founded Interis Audio Technologies in kind of near Silicon Valley in Scotts Valley, California. And I think still they only have about 10 employees. I think it's a pretty small operation. It's all centered around him and his ideas and inventions. He is the main inventor. One of the first things he invented was something called Infinity, which is a program where you could loop samples over and over and over seamlessly. Apparently that was a necessary thing.

I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Think about it. We're talking like early 90s. That was like the 808 asset house revolution. Yeah, but I just didn't realize, I guess he made it easier probably is my guess. Yes. I think he enabled it.

He enabled techno is the impression I have. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. Looping samples together seamlessly. Well, but you could already do that. What I'm saying is, is he clearly found a way to do it better and more efficiently. You're right.

He didn't invent looping. No, he made it better. Yeah, exactly. Another thing he did was invented the microphone modeler. Modeling is a big thing in music. You can get guitar amplifiers that model, basically means imitate other amps. Right. I have a modeling amp which I don't use anymore because it's not very good.

But it models. There's like 12 different classic amps. It models supposedly. Oh, nice. But he invented all the modeling microphone, which means you could mimic like classic microphones or like a harmonica mic and vintage mics, like the Elvis Presley, that cool looking mic. I'm sure that was on there.

Oh, is that the silver kind of rounded rectangular one? Noel's got one on his desk. Yeah, yeah. It's associated with Elvis Presley. Well, I mean, just the music of that time. I got you. But I always picture Elvis. Yeah.

You know what I mean? I can see that. Yeah. Have you ever seen his grandson, by the way? Quicksidebar? No. His name is Quicksidebar. Yeah.

Quicksidebar Presley. It's a weird name. Yeah. But, you know, Lisa Marie was his mom. So. Oh, yeah. That was very funny, by the way. He just looked him up.

I think, what's his name? I can't remember his name. His last name is the father's name, Lisa Marie's first husband, is who she had him with. Oh, okay. Yeah. Just look at Elvis Presley's grandson. It is creepy, dude.

Looks exactly like Elvis at that age. Like scary, scary, eerily similar. Can he sing? That I don't know. Does he use auto-tune? That I do know. If he sings, he probably uses auto-tune. Probably.

Because 90% of singers apparently use auto-tune. I've seen even higher than that. Really? Yeah. How about that? 90% admit it. Yeah. There's this thing about auto-tune where you deny that you use it, even though you're

totally aware that everyone uses it. I read an article where apparently this one producer said that he's worked with two artists that haven't used it. Everyone else has. And it was Nico Case and Nelly Furtado, and then apparently later after that Nelly Furtado released a single that had tons of auto-tune on it. Nico Case remains solid. She may be the only artist in the world who hasn't used auto-tune, either subtly or to

the nth degree. Oh, well, that's certainly not true. I think there are plenty of indie artists, but if you're talking... You should read this Verge article. It basically lays it out like, no, everyone uses this. So apparently producers don't even necessarily tell the band that it's being used right then because there's a live function so that the monitors or the headphones that the band is hearing is being run through auto-tune.

So what they're hearing is already corrected, so they think they just did a perfect take. Yeah. I'm just wary of any time someone says out of 20 million singers, one person doesn't. That's just very dubious claim. I don't know, we're talking music industry here, especially when a lot of people are making their own music in their own homes. Well that's another thing too. They're not a part of the pop machine.

They don't have stats on that, you know. I'm just saying that sounds like a load of garbage to me. I'm sure more than one person doesn't use auto-tune. It's just one. So auto-tune came about, apparently this is the tale, because of a dinner that Hildebrand was at. He was having lunch with a sales rep and the wife said something funny like, hey Andy, can you, why don't you invent something to make me sing in tune?

And he went, no, great idea. That's a great Hildebrand. We should have auto-tuned that. Maybe we could. Maybe it was. Maybe it just happened. And so he said, you know what, if I can tell Jed Clampett where the oil is, then I can make you sing in tune.

And he did. And he did. He created auto-tune. And we've kind of mentioned how it works. Basically it takes that take of a singer's song. It takes the vocals of a song. And you select what key you're singing in. And then auto-tune goes through and makes this map of that vocal track.

And it goes through and says, oh, this one's a little flat. This one's a little low or whatever. And it just nudges these things into tune, into the key that it's supposed to be in. So all of the notes that the singer hits in that take are within the correct key, meaning that they all sound great. It's a perfect take, right? Well, yeah, and the key there is it's in the original tone and inflection of the artist. So you can't tell it's happening.

No. And there's actually, if you look at the auto-tune product demo videos, it's amazing. So there's an automatic version where you select the key and let auto-tune do its thing and it does a pretty great job. One of the ways that it does this is it adds like millisecond pauses in between notes. There's little spaces between notes, which gives it a natural feel. There's other selections that you can make like throat length. You can select how long the singer's throat is and you can do that note by note.

So you can make the whole thing even more natural until basically what you've done is taught auto-tune how to simulate a particular singer's singing style and voice so that when it adjusts that note, it does it within the same exact range that the singer would have done had they hit it correctly. It's pretty amazing and advanced stuff. Oh, totally. When normal people think of auto-tune like you and me who are not in the music biz, we think of this thing that's called the zero function.

Yes. And you know what? Let's take a break and we will explain what the zero function is right after this. Hey, friends. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the

Backyard Guest House over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Mangesha Tickler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. The Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, the suspense is kidding me. You're going to kill us, kill. All right, zero function. That was essentially what the share effect was. Okay.

Yes. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. You just sat up in your chair like you were about to arm wrestle. I know. I've been, you go ahead. You talk about it.

Well, what autotune does in terms of the zero function is, is it gets rid of all of that space and when shares voice changes, it's immediate. Yeah. All of those notes go right up against each other. Yeah. And it creates this robotic sounding voice. Yeah. It's not like a, what's the word I'm looking for, it's, it's not like a normal vibrato

that you would get. Right. Because in a normal vibrato, there's, there's pauses. There's space in between the notes. Yeah. With this, it's note, note, note all pressed up against each other in a compressed way. And that zero function is what, what, it takes any spaces out between the notes and creates that robot sound.

Yeah, cause I think autotune had, has a range of numbers to make it flow more seamlessly. And when they took it all the way down to zero, which means there's nothing there. Yeah. It created that weird effect that they're like, ah, share, you're listening to this. It's weird. Yeah. And she was like, I like weird. It's great, baby.

I hear number one hit in my future. No, you got it wrong. It's, it's great, baby. Is that autotune? No, that was a, that was Jack from, um, Will and Grace. Oh. Do you remember when he thought he was talking to a, um, a share impersonator? Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's like, no, uh, if I could turn back to her, teaching her how to say it, how to sing it correctly. I thoroughly enjoyed Will and Grace. Oh, it was great show. Good stuff.

The great makeup model. Holds up really well. Agreed. All right. Where are we? Right. Right. Yeah.

And that's what it was called again. And Tari's called this zero function, the share effect for many years. And, um, and over time, remember her producer just kept lying and lying and lying. Yeah. Uh, over time, other producers independently figured out what he had done that he had used this zero function, which is a really obscure tool on a, um, a software suite that not everybody knew about. Right.

He took some, some brainpower and some experimentation, but little by little, some producers figured it out. This one producer, um, did a remix of a J Lo song and used it. And he, I think was the second person to use it, um, publicly. And, uh, it, for a brief time, it became known as the J Lo effect. Oh, of course. Anybody who used this without fessing up to it at first in the early 2000s, it was called the whatever effect.

Yeah. And there's this, uh, producer rapper down in Florida named T pain. Oh boy. And T pain heard this J Lo effect. He loved it. He went on a mission to figure out what this was. And he finally apparently took him years to figure it out. He finally figured out that it was this zero effect on this pro tools plugin.

Um, and he started using it and just went crazy with it. Like up to this point, it was used to like tweak or it would maybe make, um, a track of just a little weird over here or something like that. Yeah. He used it as often as he possibly could. Yeah. He basically said the zero function and T pain are one in the same. Yeah.

And it became known as the T pain effect. Really? Yeah. Because when people asked him how he did it, guess what he said, vocoder. Did he really? Yes. No. Yes.

He did. And for years he managed to make a mint because the whole thing was in hip hop or in pop. If you wanted this T pain effect, T pain needed to console at least, if not produce your record. That was like 10 years after the share effect. I know. How did people not know that? I, I, he, he managed to pull it off for years and years and years. Good for T pain is what I say.

Yes. You know? Yeah. I mean he apparently was like, um, I guess on a plane ride usher was on the same plane and asked to speak to him and usher was like, I've got to get something off my chest. You really screwed up music like big time. Well, T pain was like, I made a bunch of money doing this and people seem to like it. So I'm not going to stop.

Hildebrand has been vilified by many and he said, you know what? I just make the car. I don't drive it down the wrong side of the road. Yeah. It's a great quote. Yes. Because a lot of people hate auto tune and think it's the worst thing that happened to music.

A lot of people like it and say when you use it for what it's supposed to be used for, it can really help out because, you know, it's not like everyone uses it all the time. I'm sure some people need it way more than others. Well, even if you're using it as a light cosmetic touch, like Hildebrand originally designed it for, a lot of people say, no, we shouldn't even be doing that. Because if you go back and listen to things like Bob Dylan or The Beach Boys or just a lot of these original artists that didn't use these kind of effects on their voice, and they sang and their recordings made it through the studio, there were still flat

notes here or there. Oh yeah. But it was their music. It was their voice. It was their vocals in these tracks and everyone came to know and love them. But now, because everything is auto tuned perfectly, even the stuff that you can't hear, it's auto tuned because they're not using a zero function. But just the fact that it's been run through the auto tune, this stuff sounds really rough

by comparison. Sure. It's like auto tune has ruined music. It ruined music that people love for decades because now by comparison, it seems rough. Well, but it also like a good ear can tell if something's auto tuned. It has this weird tinny quality that it doesn't sound natural. So I think there will be blowback and a reversion back to older methods. Okay.

I bet you Jack White has an auto tuned. That's the most pure as the pure guys. No, he uses all sorts of weird vocal effects on his stuff. No, but as far as like, I bet he has. Ask him. All right. He wouldn't have been it. Apparently, that's par for the course.

Yeah. So T-Pain, if we can get back to the history of this. Buy you a drink. So T-Pain, right? The hit. He's huge. Like he's just everything he drops is just blowing up all over the place. He's getting invited to consult and produce on Kanye's album, which ultimately had a lot

of auto tune. Every track had auto tune on it by the time T-Pain got done with it, right? Yeah. Have you heard his Queen Bohemian Rhapsody live? No. Dude. Is it good? Oh, no.

Oh, no. It's there's a video that someone spliced of him and he and Freddie Mercury. It's one of the worst things I've ever heard on a set on a stage. Oh, I've got to check it out. It's terrible. Okay. All right. I got to see that.

Yeah. It's good. So the T-Pain effect again. Yeah. And if you wanted this effect, you had to have T-Pain. Well, Snoop Dogg says that's enough of that. Oh, finally. And he releases something called Sensual Seduction.

And it's one of the better rap videos you've ever seen. It's pretty good. Yeah. There's a star wipe in it. So you know I love it. So Snoop releases this using the T-Pain effect to great degree, but he didn't consult with T-Pain. T-Pain had nothing to do with this record.

So Snoop kind of opened the floodgates saying, if you guys want to use this, go use it. But what's interesting, if you watch that video, when Snoop is doing like the T-Pain effect or the auto-tune stuff, he's actually got a tube going to his synthesizer to make it look like he's using a vocoder. Oh, interesting. Isn't that weird? Yeah, that is weird. It's a video.

Yeah. But anyway, he thinks- Are you sure that wasn't a marijuana smoking device? It may have been. It may have been. Yeah. I think about it. But Snoop changed everything in that he took T-Pain out of the equation and really opened

the floodgates for anybody and everybody to use this stuff. Simultaneously, Jay-Z was trying to close those floodgates and push all of it back in. Yeah. I think Jay-Z clearly jumped the shark at a certain point. You know when major ad brands are making ads using the latest and greatest that it's years late first of all, and that means it has definitely jumped the shark, and in 2009, Wendy's had a frosty posse commercial where a gang of office workers built it out auto-tuned rhymes while searching for frosties.

I don't remember that ad, do you? I know, but I went and watched it, of course. How is it? Pretty great. It's what you think it is. Pretty great. No. It's terrible.

Jay-Z apparently saw this and was enraged, and so he wrote a song called DOA, Death of Auto-Tune. I know we're facing a recession, but the music y'all are going to make it the Great Depression. Get back to rap. You T-Pain in too much. That's calling someone out. Yeah. Hard.

Yeah. But other auto-tune, the news was a big YouTube hit. Oh, yeah, man, the bed intruder song? Yeah. Let's play a clip from that from 2010. It was a local news footage from Huntsville, Alabama of Antoine Dodson delivering warnings. Who is an awesome human being? Yeah, about a neighborhood intruder and someone auto-tuned that.

The Gregory Brothers did. That's right. Let's hear that real quick. Have you listened to that recently? No. It's pretty great. Yeah. Yeah.

But again, that was in 2010, and I think that even kind of had a pretty short shelf life. Right. Unless they're still doing it. I don't know. That was, what'd you say, the Gregory Brothers, the Brooklyn soul band? Yeah, they started out doing auto-tune the news. Yeah. And they would take the news and just auto-tune it and turn it and just produce it, over-produce

it. And they did that with the bed intruder song, and that actually became the number one video on YouTube of all of 2010. I look, the original video has 128 million views right now. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty impressive stuff. At the same point, like now auto-tune has become a parody of itself. Yes.

It's being used in ads. Sure. Here's the progression. Something starts out, someone uses it artistically, someone comes along and over-uses it, then everybody starts to over-use it. And Wendy's makes a commercial using it. Newsweek finally gets around to writing an article about it. And then years after, we record a podcast on it.

And then the thing finally dies. Yeah. And then 15 or 20 years after that, it becomes hip again. Yes. You know? That's the progression. So the point that we're at though now, Chuck, it's not so cut and dry, man. It's not as cut and dry as Jay-Z would like to have you think.

No. When I came out with this death of auto-tune track in 2009, auto-tune is still around. Very much. And now it's getting to the point where, if like The Verge, and I can't remember the other article I read, they're both on this podcast page, if they're to be believed, they're credible sources, and they certainly seem like it from these articles. There's this growing question of, is auto-tune here to stay? People are starting to compare it to the initial reaction that people had to the electric guitar.

Sure. It was a lot different from the original guitar, and people took a lot of getting used to it, or like when Bob Dylan went electric. Yeah. A lot of people didn't like that. Newport. But then look at what happened now with the electric guitar. A lot of people tried different stuff with it, and it became a standard.

Some people are wondering if auto-tune is going to fulfill the same destiny. I think most people are hoping that it does not. Yeah. And sweetening vocals is nothing new, like reverb is a tried and true thing for years and embraced. Sure. Does that sweeten vocals? I thought that was always used to like make it weird.

No, it's sort of like it gives it an echo, like you're singing in a big empty church hall or something, but it makes it sweetens it. It doesn't like correct anything, but when I say sweetens it, it just makes it sound a little better. I got you. Reverb's a great tool. Right. The point is it's artificial.

Yeah. It's not natural. Yeah. They tried to replicate like singing in a big empty echo-y hallway with an effect, and it worked. Right. And another argument in favor of auto-tune that I've seen is simply taking a human voice and recording it automatically makes it artificial.

Like if they're not there in the room with you singing to you at that moment, anything else is artificial. True. So what's the problem? So just to let people know, I put out two texts during the episode to musician friends. Jack White? No. I texted Lucy Wainwright, our buddy.

Yep. AKA Jerry from our TV show. She's not answered. Okay. Which means she's used auto-tune, kidding. And our buddy Joey Ciara from the Henry Clay people, formerly of Henry Clay people, now with Fakers. And he said, I think there were a few harmonized ooze and ahs on one of our old records where

we did some pitch correcting. But that's it. I think. Maybe. So. Definitely. He's probably going to be mad that I said that. Thank you for being forthright, Joey.

Yeah. Good guy. Sure. You got anything else about auto-tune? Yeah. Just a really quick, this is from a great website, 10 artists that are essentially computer programs. They just have the most auto-tune people.

They have T-Pain, Kesha, Chris Brown, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, Daft Punk. But Paris Hilton, who I forgot, actually had a song. The cast of Glee, Katy Perry, and number one was Owl City, who I don't even know what that is. There is a huge outcry, apparently, among Glee fans for Glee to stop using so much auto-tune. I think the deal is they're like, well, these are actors. Yeah. Well, yeah.

And there's another, there's a big scandal with the UK's Got Talent or something weird like that. Yeah. Where they were using a lot of auto-tune for the auditions. Oh. It's like, come on. Come on. She's good.

Well, anyway. Oh, man. That's not a very surprising list. So this has been grumpy old men. I don't feel like we've been grumpy yet. We haven't like condemned it outright. No. Nico Case.

She's my lady. She condemns it outright. Yeah. Emily, I have an agreement about Nico Case. We could both marry her if she was ever available to us. She's right behind you. Oh my God. So we have a very, well, I'm going to finish up your deal.

Sorry. I just jumped the gun. Okay. Thank you. You don't have anything else about auto-tune. No. I was just teasing. We have a special listener mail with guests.

Well, hold on. Let me finish first. Okay. Okay. Well, since Chuck doesn't have anything, it's the end. And if you want to know more about auto-tune, you can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, and this article I had to say, by the way, was the most definitive article about auto-tune on the Internet.

How about that? It's a good one. So you can go look that up. And since I said definitive, it's time for listener mail. And it's a special one like Chuck said. That's right. Today we got a joint listener mail to ourselves and to Holly and Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History class.

Yep. So we're going to bring them in, right? We're going to read the email and we're going to talk about its implications right now. Let's start now. So without further ado, we actually have Holly and Tracy of Stuff You Missed in History class with us. Yay. Hi.

And Tracy, we have actually not with us. She's with us in spirit and voice from Boston. I know. It's pretty interesting when it comes in through your headphones, but the other person somewhere else. It's kind of awesome. And this is how you guys do the show now, right? Yes.

We also have like an online, you know, we have a Google Hangout where we both are so we can see each other as well. Well, that's neat. We should have done that. Have Tracy in here with her little video image. Or like a hologram over. That'd be pretty cool too. That's true.

All right. So I think the first thing I should do is... You could have a picture of me like our old boss. Oh, well, I do have a picture of you. I have the wallet size that you gave out, so I'll just look at that. I think the first thing we should do is just read. I'll read the email here and then we will discuss like adults. How about that?

What? So like I said, I already set it up that we both got an email from a listener and she says the following and this is from Amanda Lyons. Hey guys and gals. She didn't say that, of course. I just did. Well, you should read it verbatim. Josh, Chuckers, Holly and Tracy and of course a hello to Jerry and Noel.

I'm a social worker from Portland, Oregon with a passion for human equity and respect. One of the original members of the SYSK Army and a more recent listener to Mr. History. I binged for about five months before I got all caught up. So how about that? I'm concerned about something. I've heard a few times on the history podcast and I was wondering if you guys would be willing to get together, we are, and look into something to fulfill my curiosity. When Josh and Chuck receive corrections, they thank people for being nice and frequently

ask people not to be jerks when correcting them. When Holly and Tracy talk about corrections, they receive, they ask people to be nice and have referred to corrections on several occasions as hate mail. My concern is that listeners may be more disrespectful to Holly and Tracy because they are women and even if listeners are rude to Josh and Chuck, they may reign it in when making corrections because they are men. Could be completely off base, but if I'm right, I feel like the discrepancy should be addressed on the podcast to raise awareness about how people treat men and women differently and

even to address people's tendency to feel protected by the anonymity of the internet and say things online they wouldn't say to someone's face. So Manda, we did talk about it via email and now we're going to talk about it like regular human folks. Tracy really has the wealth of information because of her job and what she's been responsible for in the past. Oh yeah? That sounds serious.

Yeah. I was part of the management team of the website for several years before I started actually being on a podcast and for a chunk of that time, most of the podcasters reported to me. So even though I wasn't managing the podcast program, I was sort of keeping tabs on the iTunes reviews for everybody and there was a definite, definite trend in that the podcast that had women on them got disproportionately more vicious comments about what their voices sounded like versus the podcast with men on them which got less of that. So this is news to me.

Misogyny on the internet. I wasn't aware that that was a thing. He said that was a beautiful blind spot of all time. No, I can imagine and I know Tracy, you've like pointed some of these out before. For us, it's like, yeah, we'll get the hate mail every once in a while but it's kind of easy to dismiss because even if it is directed at us, it's not necessarily directed at our gender or whatever. It's not personal.

Or even if it is personal, it's dumb. It's just dumb stuff. It's easy to not take personally even when it's meant to be personal. But that to me speaking is like a white male age 18 to 49. So I can imagine that when someone attacks you just based on your gender or even worse, if they're coming after you and they don't even realize that they're being driven by this disdain for your gender. It has to make it a lot harder to just dismiss.

Yeah, well, how you can go? I was going to say for me, I mean, I am lucky in that I really give very few dams about what most people think. Like unless you're sitting in my lap or paying my paycheck, like it's great if you like me, but if you don't, that's cool too, like everybody do your thing. But eventually like the landslide builds up and it's not so much that I'm like heartbroken or traumatized, but it just wears you down after a while where you're like, why am I doing this?

Absolutely. Just to get more of this crap. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we definitely have what we have been called slurs based on our gender before. Oh, for sure. We have been called the C word over the podcast. Are you serious?

Right. Yes. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, and then I told you about that when we were discussing the email in our email conversation, I told you about the person who wrote to us and said they didn't understand how I could be in the same room with Holly without strangling her. Like that's the kind of stuff that people will write to us and be really awful.

But we do get a whole lot of them that I don't think people are consciously being misogynistic, but they're talking to us and about us in a very gendered way. So people tell us that we sound shrill or that we sound bossy. And those aren't words that people would use to describe men most of the time. Well, no, because men are assertive. And most of them. They're not bossy. Right.

They're complex. Yeah. And all of the articles that had come out lately about especially vocal fry and other things that people criticize about women's voices that they don't generally criticize about men's voices. Yeah. Every single time I read it and I'm like, I could have written that about my job and my experience being a woman talking on the internet.

So which one, which one hits home the most like one that's just a direct personal attack or the ones that or the person's just being unconsciously misogynistic, which to me would seem more entrenched. Yeah. To me, the second one is worse and it's especially worse because a lot of the implicitly gendered criticism that we get is also from women. Oh, yeah. I was going to ask that.

That's the hardest part. Yeah. That's the hardest part for me to deal with. Yeah. When they're real specific, for example, like the person who wants me to be strangled. At the end of the day, I'm like, he's working through his own stuff. I really have very little to do with this. I may have been the trigger that caused this little outrage bomb, but really it has very

little to do with me. I think almost 100% of the time that is the case. These are people who have their own gripes in life and are probably angry, unhappy people. Yes. But then as Tracy said, when you get those ones that are like they're not even conscious of how it's playing out, you realize how much it is a bigger sort of systemic social problem. Yeah.

Because most of those people are not evil. They don't intend to be misogynistic. They're not conscious that they're separating the two genders and judging them differently on different criteria. So yeah, those are, as Tracy said, a little more disturbing because you realize that it's kind of like the silent creep that underlays everything. Absolutely. Well, we do get a lot of emails that are great from people who are great and the majority

of the email that we get is great. So I don't want to make it sound like every person who writes to us is awful. And we talk about corrections on the episode a lot of times from people who write it and everything is fine and everything's very respectful. So to me, a correction is you said this person died in 1918, but really it was 1927. That's a correction and that's fine. But then we'll also get ones that are like, I can't believe you didn't even bother to look this up.

You completely butchered it. I don't know why you don't even put more thought into what you're doing because it's really important that you represent yourselves well. And that's what I'm like. That's hate mail. Well, we get a lot of those, but I never feel like those are like have anything to do with my gender. Yeah.

In those cases. Absolutely. I mean, we get the same exact emails where it's just like you guys are total idiots. Like how could you drop the ball this badly and it's like, we basically said exactly what you're saying. We just said it slightly differently. It definitely doesn't warrant this kind of reaction, you know, um, yeah, I might, I why do you think there is a gender bias or a gender, why is it worse for you guys being

women? Like not just in, in comments, aside from the history of the world, but I know, like, how long do you have? But I mean, like, even, even beyond comments, like, why is the internet so geared toward hating women? I mean, what's, what's the deal with that? Do you guys, is there, is there a general understanding or idea behind it? Lonely angry men is my guess.

Well, I think it's, it's super complex, right? There's no one simple answer. Like some of it is that we have reached an age where the disparity in terms of gender equality has shrunk at the same time that a lot of people have this outlet readily available to them. So there's progress being made, but there are also the people who are still kicking and screaming as they get dragged into a future they're not comfortable with. But then there's also just the thing that again, I don't think people are even conscious

of it where it is new for many people and even people that are younger and have maybe grown up in a more kind of old school, traditional environment, be it household or community, where they're not even conscious of why they're more upset at women. There's just something about women, you know, sharing knowledge or being assertive or being confident that just rankles them and they don't even register that it's because it's a woman. They just know there's something about that person I hate and it's something they're just not used to and they haven't kind of made the mental customization to, oh, sometimes

people that aren't dudes have stuff to say as well. Right. Do you think that same experience is extrapolatable under race as well as gender and in a very much the same way? Well, I mean, I know it is, but I mean, is it almost like a step for step? Do you think? I think it's probably pretty similar models. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, speaking like as a white person in a room of white people who are on the phone right now, the worst days I have ever had managing our Facebook page are days when we talk about something that has to do with systemic racism and we'll get a flood of similarly implicitly racist comments from people who really don't know that the view that they just put out there is racist, like that's sort of the same thing like a lot of people do things that are misogynist, not really consciously being misogynist that just it comes out and they're not consciously aware of it and we see the same thing on our Facebook

posts in subjects that are related to race really pretty often. So at the end of the day, when you guys get a bunch of these say on just a particularly bad day, what do you do? I mean, do you battle this, do you just brush it off and be like, these guys are idiots and whether they like it or not, they are going to be dragged into the future against their will. You know, do you do a combination of both? Or do you look at your status as a perennial top 20 podcast and say they clearly who cares

what they say because we're really good at what we do because we're very successful. I do a combination of things. I have kind of a library of links about vocal fry and whatever anyone writes directly to us to complain about vocal fry, I kind of send them, hey, why don't you listen to this, this American life segment, all about vocal fry in which Ira Glass has vocal fry the entire segment but nobody complains at him about it. So like I specifically will address that I will specifically address things that people say on our Facebook page in public because I feel like our role as a podcast about history

does not include allowing people free reign to be racist in public and and have that not be challenged. But when it comes to the like the email that Holly and I got that was that was so bad pretty recently that was the person who was basically advocating me murdering Holly. I was actually traveling, I went down to the hotel bar and had a drink, read a book and tried to chill. Yeah. I tried to chill out about it.

There's the answer. Booze. Yeah. Cocktail fixes everything. Well, thank you both for addressing this. Yeah. I'm sorry we didn't solve this problem here in this listener mail segment. Thank you for having us on the show.

Of course. If anyone out there and stuff you should know land has not checked out stuff you miss in history class, you definitely should because it is super awesome and as are both of you and I don't want to strangle you, but I want to hug your necks. You do. Aw. That's what they say in the cell. In a Lenny sort of way.

Yeah. Nope. You cut a rabbit. And now she don't move no more. Nope, but thanks for coming in and we should do this more often, you know. We should. We should have a whole show where we just get together and do round table stuff. We can have yappy pow wow party time.

That would be fun. Let's hold it. Yeah. Well, if you have something to say about all this, we're sure you will. We want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can tweet to stuff you missed in history class at. At missed in history.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can join stuff you missed in history class at. Missed in history. Facebook.com slash missed in history. Make it easy. What about email? What do they get in touch with you? History podcast at house of works dot com.

And you can hit us up at stuffpodcast at house of works dot com and as always join us at our home on the web stuff you should know dot com and missed in history dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit house stuff works dot com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, kpop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable

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We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.