Switched on Pop - Auto-Tune always and forever

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Popular music changes all the time, but there’s been one consistent element in practically everything released in the last two decades: Auto-Tune is everywhere. What started as a simple audio processing tool in the 1990s has become the dominant force in music. Artists are training to sing with Auto-Tune; songs sound like Auto-Tune. Like it or hate it, Auto-Tune is everywhere. And to be clear, most people like it. On this episode of The Vergecast music journalist and Switched on Pop co-host Charlie Harding tells us the story of Auto-Tune. (Disclosure: Switched on Pop is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, as is The Vergecast.) It starts, of all places, in the oil and gas industry. It involves artists like Cher and T-Pain, spreads like wildfire throughout the music business, and quickly becomes so utterly ubiquitous that you probably notice when Auto-Tune isn’t used more than when it is. As we barrel toward whatever the “AI era” of music will be, we also look for clues in Auto-Tune’s story that point to what’s coming next. We talk about the distinct sound that comes from tools like Suno and Udio, how artists will use and abuse AI, and whether we should be worried about what it all means. We haven’t yet found the “Believe” of the AI music era, but it’s probably coming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Hey, it's Charlie. It's that time of year. We're thinking about all of our resolutions, about how we want to improve our lives. And I'll tell you what I'm resolving to do. I want more autotune in my life. You might be thinking, wait a minute,

hold on, more autotune? Haven't people declared the death of Autotune years ago? I think that we are still in the early days of figuring out how to maximize the emotional capabilities that Autotune gives us. You're thinking, wait, emotion, Autotune? Yes, seriously. I was recently on the Verge's premiere podcast, The Vergecast, speaking with editor-at-large,

David Pierce, about the surprising history of Autotune and its connection, no joke, to the oil and gas industry, and tracing its creative development over the many decades. And I think there's still a lot that we can get from Autotune yet. Here's that conversation with David Pierce on The Vergecast. Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast. of the difference between reverb and deverb. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I have decided that I am going to relearn how to play the guitar.

So I have this guitar that sits behind me on all of my meetings and all of my podcast recordings, and so people are often like, oh, that's cool. Do you play guitar? What's your favorite song? Do you know time of your life by Green Day? Like, all this stuff. And the answer is I don't really play.

I used to. I played a lot when I was a kid for a long time. I was actually pretty good at it. But then I got to that point that you get to with a lot of things where my guitar teacher was like, You either need to try harder and care about this more or just quit. And so I just quit. Bad choice in retrospect, but like I was 12.

What are you going to do? But now I have this guitar and I've decided I'm going to remember how to play it. So I got this app, Musician, that people really recommend and I really like so far. It just sits here on the iPad and it tells me what to play and it actually uses the microphone to see if I'm playing it correctly and gives you this sort of dynamic feedback as you go. It's not as good as having like a person to teach me, but I can. do it in my basement. So I'm calling it a victory. So far, I have learned basically that this is a C chord and not much else. But you know, it's progress. We're doing it one day at a time. Anyway,

that is not what we're here to talk about. This is the second episode in our miniseries all about the future of music. Last week, we talked to Jack Coyne about track star and basically music content and how we as fans discover new music and how musicians discover new fans and be, in the world. This week we're talking about a technology that I think you could argue is the single most important thing that has happened to music in the last two decades. And that thing is Autotune. We're talking to Charlie Harding, who is a longtime Vergecast contributor and a friend of the show, and also the co-host of the excellent podcast Switched-on Pop. I'll link it in the show notes. If you don't listen to it, you should. It's excellent. He's going to tell us all about the history of Autotune,

how it changed music, and maybe try to figure out with us if there's There's a way to take what happened to AutoTune over the last two decades and think ahead. As we get to AI and TikTok and all the other changes that are happening to the music industry, what can we learn from what has happened with AutoTune that might give us a hint about where we're going the next 25 years. All that is coming up in just a sec. We have a lot of very fun songs to play. They are going to stick in your brain for months. And I'm very, very sorry about that, but it's going to be worth it.

It's going to be awesome. All that is coming up, but I just remembered how to play it. decord, and so I'm going to go do that a bunch of times and feel very good about myself. I know two chords now. I'm basically a guitar player. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Welcome back. All right, let's just get into it. So Charlie Harding, like I said, is a music journalist. He's a professor of music. He's also the co-host of Switched on Pop, one of my absolute favorite deep, wonky music podcasts. I really cannot recommend it enough. He's been on this show with us before, talking mostly about AI music, we did a great episode with him last fall where we tried to make a song with

AI and it got weird and very fun. He was around for the whole laser bong craziness. We talked a lot about AI Drake with him. We've talked a lot about AI with Charlie. Today we're going to talk about something different, and that is Autotune. But one of the reasons I wanted to have Charlie here to do this is that I think there might be some similarities between the story of Autotune and the story of AI. So in order to do that, Charlie is going to show up here and he's going to tell us the story of Autotune, how it changed music, how it changed the world, and then we're going to try to figure out if there's anything we can learn about what comes next. So here we go. Let's just get into it. Here's my conversation with Charlie Harding. Charlie Harding, welcome back to the show.

Pleasure to be here. It's been a minute. This is very fun. I was like having a reason to talk to you. And this time it's not about like weird AI videos on YouTube. This is very exciting for us. I imagine we will get to AI because that is the topic. We will almost certainly get to AI videos on YouTube. I just realized that is where we're headed here at some point. But we're going to take a minute to get there. So I want to start like this. This is sort of a like needlessly pedantic way to start this conversation.

But I've realized in prepping for this that when we talk about Autotune, we're kind of talking about a bunch of things, but also one very specific thing. So before we get into the whole story of Autotune, like, What is Autotune? What do people mean when they refer to Autotune today in 2024? I think there's two different definitions of AutoTune. The sort of formal definition is that there's a company called Entaris that made a audio software tool called Autotune that is used to help people adjust the pitch of their vocal after they have recorded it. Or actually, you can even record it live into Autotune today. That is also an effect people use.

It's an audio processing effect. and it is also, second definition, basically becomes synonymous with any kind of pitch correction. There are many companies that help us do pitch correction. And so when you say autotune, you could either mean this audio plug-in or you could mean any form of pitch manipulation and correction. Okay, so autotune is like the Kleenex of the space.

It is both a thing, but it's also the name everybody uses to refer to everything kind of like it. Yes, exactly. Okay, got it. So let's go all the way back to the beginning here. You mentioned Autotune the product. Yes. Where did it come from?

There are so many things in audio that have come from the military industrial complex aerospace, and in this case, the oil industry. Because Autotune was invented by a guy named Andy Hildebrand, who was a geologist, who worked in oil and gas, and he used techniques like the Foyer Transform analysis, which is used both in geophysics, and in audio processing. And he helped find oil deposits using wave seismology tools. I don't quite know the science of this stuff. I'm a music journalist.

And he had this idea that he wanted to pursue his passion in music. He was a flautist. And that is one who plays the flute, just to be clear. And so he launched this software company in the 90s and built a tool that used some of the math and software. that he had used in oil and gas to create a pitch correction tool. Somehow the wave technology he used to identify oil fields also applied to how we can better tune our vocals. So thank you, oil and gas for pitch correction. If there's any reason you didn't like auto tune, I just gave

you another one. Yeah, right? It's for better or for worse. I have to say no single part of that answer was remotely close to what I expected. I love this is great. So how does it go from like Guy makes science project to actually being used. I think brief spoiler alert we're going to get to share here very quickly. Yeah, of course. Is Cher the very, very beginning of that story

or was Autotune kind of around in the industry before Share happened? It's very close to Share. The tool Autotune launches in 1997. Shares believe, which is really the song where

people start to recognize the effect, isn't until the fall of 1998. The idea of autotune was that it would be a sort of subtle effect to help slightly enhance a out-of-tune vocal, not completely out of tune. Like, you still had to sing pretty well in tune, but it could help sort of nudge the bad moments back into tune. And so there certainly were some producers that were using it before Cher.

What Cher did is that she and her team took this tool and kind of abused it. They set the setting so that it pitch corrected as fast as it possibly could in such a way that it created this very strange vocal effect that they started calling the Cher effect. I do have to note, though, there is an important recording that came out before Shares believe that also had this over-the-top auto-tune effect, and it's very unfortunate that it is Kid Rock's Only God-Nose-W-W-W-Wrleased a few months before Shares Believe. They say that every... Yeah, that's tough.

We'll give us a share. I think it's right. The chair gets the right. And the thing is, that song was released as an album cut, not as a single, but after shares believed, they were like, oh, that's a cool sound. And we already did it. So they later released Only God knows why as a single. And so it's often heard as having occurred after shares believe.

It was technically released beforehand. So... Fair enough. We've got oil and gas. We've got Kid Rock. We're just... We're hitting all the marks right now. Some tough bedfellows on the broadcast today.

So it's super interesting to me that at the very beginning, like months after this thing was launched for this a sensibly pretty straightforward purpose. Yeah, anodyne, totally. It's already being used in these wild out there surprising ways. Did it happen like that from the very beginning? Like, was it, it seems like it got crazy before it got quiet in such a really interesting way with AutoTune. Well, the share effect was almost. the one-off. Some people started to do similar-ish things. You can think of like Madonna's music

in 2000 has a sort of pitch correctiony sound. Daft Punk's one more time. In 2001, actually uses a different pitch correction tool, but people start to mimic this effect for sure. It's much more common that people are using auto tune, the proper tool, this effect, as like really gentle pitch correction. And so the share effect was kind of like, I think at first kind of a one-off novelty. People were using autotune though. Like you can hear it very audibly

on a song like Maroon Fives, She Will Be Loved from 2002, where it was supposed to be subtly used, but there's something just like a little bit wrong with the recording. And people picked up on the fact that like, I don't know. There's something about that vocal, which is slightly inhuman. I can't identify it because it's not that like hard tuning share effect. It's it's the auto tune tool, but kind of overused. And people started to complain, oh, this is the sign of the end of music. People aren't really singing. They're doing something after the fact to, you know, make it glossy and sheenie. Fascinating. Was that the reaction to share even because she was not trying to hide what was going on there?

No, no. Well, when you listen to the song Believe, it uses both a mix of tuning and no tuning. In the verse, she begins with autotune on. And she's sort of singing about, you know, trying to find love after a broken heart. And there's this sort of feeling of like this, you know, this robotic, just going through the motions kind of person. And the vocal tuning almost matches the presentation. of the lyric. Then as she goes into the chorus, she sings, I believe in Life After Love, she actually drops the auto tune. So it's actually this creative effect in which

she's saying, like, I can feel robotic and like soulless, and then I can sort of break through and shares, of course, an amazing vocalist, and so she turns that effect on and off to match the lyric of the song. When it came out, though, everyone's like, whoa, what is she doing? Not like, oh,

she's not singing, but that is a very strange and cool effect. I want to do that too. And Sharon, her producers actually misled people and didn't tell them what they did because they wanted to have this kind of cool proprietary sound that nobody else could mimic. That's so interesting. And at that point, Autotune, I guess, was new enough that we hadn't already sort of explored the edges of it in that same way. Oh, yeah, absolutely not.

This was totally novel to people. They'd never heard a thing quite like it. But there is a whole history of other vocal processing techniques, tools like the vocoder or the talk box. And people probably assumed, and actually the producers misled interviewers and said, oh, yeah, it's just like a vocoding tool, which is a tool that actually goes back to World War II. It was invented as a way of encoding and decoding messages to be sent undersea so they wouldn't be caught by German U-boats. I'm telling you, audio is like all military industrial stuff. We wouldn't have recorded music if it weren't for, you know, early sort of military audio tools. But in any case, they said that it was this tool that had been around for decades and decades and decades so that they could have their, you know, secret sauce.

That's so interesting. So real quick, just give me like the technical explanation of how autotune actually works. Like you mentioned its job ostensibly is to take a pitch that you sing incorrectly and make it the correct pitch. Yes. I understand that much. Yeah. What else is useful to understand about how autotune actually works in order to understand how people use it? Basically, it's a tool that is trying to identify what pitch are you attempting to sing.

And then it does what you would call pitch quantization, basically pushing the pitch that you are singing to the pitch that you're trying to sing. And you can do this at different speeds. So if I'm singing here, but I'm trying to sing here, it would go, uh, uh, it would go, uh, it would. would sort of glide you to your pitch. And when we think of the share effect or the auto tune effect, that is turning that pitch speed all the way down to zero, meaning it automatically immediately jumps your voice from one pitch to another. And when it does that, it creates this sort of digital artifacting that is unnatural, it is strange, and it is now very desirable. People like this sound and intentionally bake it in to how they sing because it is a fun, creative effect.

Got it. Okay. But in theory, it really is just that simple of like you have a pitch and you have a pitch that you want and autotune makes those the same thing. Yes. And you can say, how fast does it do it? You can maybe add some vibrato. There's all these little, you know, fine tune parameters, but basically fix my pitch. And you do this by sort of saying, I'm trying to sing in this scale and you set your scale. And then it just knows that, hey, you're singing way off your scale. Let me fix that for you. Okay. So in sort of that basic definition of it, I can actually understand why Autotune, if it worked at the beginning, and it sounds like it did, would be an immediate gigantic hit. Right. And like, from the way you describe it, it sounds like it was. Like, you talk about Madonna, you talk about Maroon 5, you talk about, like, these are A plus list artists who are using Autotune basically immediately. Did this thing just like come out and take over the music industry? I mean, it definitely today is used on the majority of recordings. And when I say majority, I mean like over 90% of recordings. The only recordings that won't use auto tune are probably going to be, and I should say, use some kind of pitch correction. The only recordings that don't use pitch correction would be like a very naturalistic rock

song, maybe an indie song. You're certainly certain rappers who are not singing use it, but the majority of any song vocal is using autotune. When it came out the gate, sure, I mean, any time that somebody needed to post-process, fix something that was out of tune, Autotune was the tool to use. There have been tools for quantizing rhythm that had existed before Autotune so that you could say, hey, you meant to hit the snare here, but you actually hit it a little bit late. Let's nudge it back over. And so producers have always wanted to find ways to fix pitch problems. And they actually had really challenging,

slow ways of fixing pitch all the way back into the 70s, where you would go into a piece of tape. There were digital processes you would send it to, and you could like nudge one little note a little bit north or south of where it's supposed to land. It was very slow and laborious. So people have always trying to perfect recordings that are slightly imperfect to make them more exactly in key. So I just keep coming back to the share thing because it's like I'm so fascinated by the idea of like a lot of what you just described are sort of tools in a producer's toolkit, right? Like things that in theory aren't sort of front and center in the recording, they're just designed to like solve a set of problems that you have. And I think there was clearly a lot of that in how autotune is used and still is. And I think like to your point, not every song sounds like believe, but if every song has auto tune, like that's, it's being used in the way it's supposed to.

But also it became an instrument in a very real way, in a way that most of these technological things don't. Right, and that's thanks to T-Pain, right? So, like, it goes from being the Cher effect to becoming the T-Pain effect. T-Pain, who, like Cher, great singer. Which no one knew forever, by the way. My favorite thing about T-Pain. Like, everybody knew Cher could sing before she did believe. But we spent, like, a decade being like, oh, T-Pain can't sing.

And it's all because of Otter T-T. Right, right. So, Cher puts up, believe, in 1998. Fast forward to 2005, T-Pain's I'm Sprung, is one of the first time that people hear this effect in the world. world of R&B. And it goes from being the share effect to being the T-Pain effect, and pretty quickly, it becomes the sort of way that people sing.

In particular, it gives rappers the capacity to sing, and there are a number of early recordings, but the one that really sort of lands it for folks is Kanye's 808 and heartbreak, the song Heartless in 2008. All of a sudden, Kanye, who, you know, he's not a particularly strong singer, has the capacity to hit a pitch and sing melodies. Once that track is out the gate, every rapper realizes that they have the opportunity to start embedding hooks into their music. And oftentimes it is the chorus hook that people sing. And so I would say from Cher to Tupin to Kanye and then everybody, it's really in the sort of late aughts that the auto tune effect,

becomes ubiquitous. It takes more than a decade from shares believe before people start using it as in the same way they might use distortion or reverb. It just becomes another tool in the toolbox that people are using as this overblown effect, not the gentle version of it. Right. But I guess one key difference

is that, at least to my knowledge, and you're much more in this than I am, but I don't remember there being a huge cultural backlash against reverb. And yet there have been at least a couple that I can remember of sort of big, loud, angry moments where the music industry or someone big in the music industry said, you know, we have to get rid of AutoTune.

It's ruining everything. It is destroying this thing we believe in. Just before we get into Ovid, make the case against Autotune. Like if you were put yourself in the position, you, Charlie Harding, hate Autotune and think it should be excised from the earth. Tell me why. I guess you could say that autotune homogenizes the voice. I'm having trouble saying this because I actually don't believe it.

We're just going to clip that part and just play it. Okay, perfect. Like, someone's unique vocal identity is the way that they hit a pitch. Nobody sings perfectly in pitch. We all scoop into our notes. We use vibrato differently. And Autotune sort of, you know, carves out all of those imperfections.

Part of what makes us sound like ourselves, makes us sound human. And so you could say that, yeah, it's a homogenizing tool. You could also say that, you know, prints, stars who don't have proper vocal training and technique. But, you know, that's like the history of rock and roll are people who were not trained singers who sing properly with all their air

and, you know, but, like, rather have personality to their voice and maybe intentionally don't sing. Like, Henry Rollins is a great example. Like, the entire word of, like, punk music is not about singing properly. So I think both of these arguments of it homogenizes the voice and it allows people who don't sing well to be stars are probably the primary criticisms. In the aughts, after Kanye's record, as more and more people start to copy the sound, there were plenty of critics who were just like, everyone's starting to sound the same. That's the age-old criticism of all popular music. Everyone sounds the same. There are still plenty of boomer YouTubers

YouTubers who like to talk about how Autotune is still ruining music. And the reality is that Autotune only becomes more popular after that era. Listeners want more of it. It's not some cabal of music executives being like, ah, ha, ha, ha, we are going to give Autotune to the people. But rather, it's like clearly people are listening to this music and they want more of it. The counter-argument to Autotune, Hamas.

homogenizing voices is that like if you listen to Drake's passion fruit passionate from miles away passive with the things you said it does not sound like Charlie X X X's 360 yeah 360 it does not sound like Travis Scott's sicko mode like like this here with all the ice on in the booth at the gate outside when they pull up they get me loose yeah jump off like you can still identify who people are. And I love that about Autotune. It's actually it's what you do with it that makes it your own way of recording. I think about it kind of like, you know, when you pick up an old style phone, there's all kinds of ways that the voice is being processed. All the low-end

information and the high-end information is being cut off and all of the dynamic volume changes are also being squash and compressed. And they're doing that to save data on networks. And yet, like, I mean, if you call me on the phone, I would immediately know it's your voice and not Neely's voice. Right. Right. Like, the ear is so meldable

to whatever effects that we use to change it. I think that's awesome. So I think where Autotune goes from here is that people learn to use this effect to enhance their own creativity, their own artistry. Artists like Drake start embedding really great hooks in his raps

because he can now sing in ways that he couldn't otherwise. He's not a great vocalist. He's a great rapper, and he's a great melodist, but, like, again, he's not trained to be a great vocalist singer. You know, we don't get Travis Scott without auto tuning. You don't get Charlie XX without auto tune. People end up using this tune, this sound very creatively, and it explodes.

Okay. And do you think of it in your own? world and work as sort of spiritually different from any other tool in a toolkit that a producer or an artist has like, is it does it belong on the same level as reverb

and distortion or is it something else entirely? I think about it as a producer and as an educator and music as just another tool in a toolbox for sure. I think that a lot of the backlash has to do with this question of like what is human and what is inhuman. The synthesizer

had the same kind of backlash in its development, that, oh, it's not a real person playing a real instrument. This is mechanical. It doesn't sound as expressive. I mean, clearly, those critics also lost the plot because the synthesizer is one of the predominant sounds of popular music. I think about it as just a normal effect that anybody can use and one that should be used creatively to enhance the feeling of a song. Okay. How has Autotune changed? It's what, 27 years old now? Yeah. Is it functionally still the same piece of software it was in the 90s? or has it? Sure, sure.

There are many... AutoTune is a software developer. Thus, they need to constantly develop new things. They got to show quarterly growth, man. Yeah, you gotta keep buying the next version. So I think, I don't know, we're well-past AutoTune X.

I can't remember what version we're on right now. Their engagement metrics are off the charts. There's like a social network in there somewhere. Oh, they have a subscription service. They've got everything. The reality is that actually a lot of people still like the Autotune effect of yesteryear. And so if you use auto tune today

and you buy the latest version of it, you can turn on classic mode so you can actually go back to how it used to sound. Autotune today is much more naturalistic. It does a better job of tuning your vocal in ways that are less obvious. But the auto tune effect that people love, whether it's with Tepin or Cher or Kanye, whoever,

what you like is that hard tuning, the thing which is inhuman, and you like to play with it. And so most people actually will just go back to the classic mode. All right, I want to talk about more about where we are right now with Autotune, but first we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. All right, we're back.

Charlie Harding is still here. Hi, Charlie. Hello. So I want to talk about Autotune kind of right now because I think you've mentioned this a little bit a couple of times, but I think the idea that the existence of Autotune has, A, changed the kinds of music that people are, like, able to make who didn't have certain kinds of skills or whatever before, but also the kinds of people who might be coming into the music industry has changed. So I'm curious if you look at sort of the sweep of like who is making music and the music that they're making,

can you look at it as like auto tune changed all of this? The fact that auto tune is everywhere and can make anyone singing sound pretty good, like has that changed the entire music universe? I kind of think about it more like the development of the electric guitar. It was like a new instrument that people could pick up and it created this new sound. And so I think young producers today want to sound like autotune. Just as in the 60s, they wanted to sound like Hendricks. Right. Like, it's the sound that is attractive. And so, yeah, it does let anybody sing, but it only lets people sing if they can't sing with the auto tune effect. And that's probably the thing that they're going for anyway. It's slightly surprising, by the way, that that sound has been popular for this

long, right? Like, we're a long way into this world. And again, you go all the way back to T-Pain in the early aughts and share even before that. And like, the idea that people like the sound of autotune has lasted a really long time. That's why it's more like a guitar or a distortion effect. It's a feeling that it gives people. It's not about vocal tuning. Like, this is what gets people angry. It's like, that makes you inhuman. But no, no, no, no. It's like the electric guitar is also unreal, right? Like, it's generating electrical signals that has to be amplified by an amplifier. It doesn't have all the acoustic properties of a beautiful acoustic guitar, but it also sings and speaks in its own unique way. And so that's how I think about it. I think that young people wanting to produce music

want to sound like autotune. I mean, truly, when you record with Autotune today, it's not a post-processing technique. I mentioned it earlier. People put Autotune on their vocal from the get-go, and they're trying to play with the effect to get it to do this weird artifacting thing. They like all the things that it does imprecisely. That's why they use the classic mode. They want it to sound like this thing from 1998. They don't want it to sound like a pristine pure tool that allows them to sing better. It's not about that. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their

game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Interesting. So explain that to me a little bit because I think one thing I've read a bunch is that one big shift was when Autotune went from a thing you did in post after you laid down a vocal track. like it was a post-processing tool to now something that you do live in the beginning.

And there was a line in the, there's a really good pitchfork story that you sent me about the history of Autotune. Oh, by Simon Reynolds. Yeah, it's spectacular. There's a line in there that's basically like there are a lot of singers who have never heard their takes without Autotune. That is like just my brain exploded thinking about that. And so, but you mentioned like thinking differently about the way that they're actually making this stuff in real time. because of Autotune. Yeah. What does that look like?

Like, what would it be like in the studio to record in a sort of immediately post-autune universe? I mean, people do this not just in studios, but in home bedrooms. I mean, the biggest stars in the world would intentionally travel to Hawaii to record and record in an Airbnb. They bring a microphone. They bring a portable, small recording interface. Oftentimes, they'll use one called the Universal Audio Apollo that allows you to run

auto tune on this little interface. live without any sort of latency so that when you're speaking into your microphone, you just hear yourself through autotune. And then they are singing, trying to get it to do things that make weird autotony sounds. I'm bad at singing with autotune. Here's like, you actually have to be good at using the effect to make it sound right. You have to intentionally sing slightly out of tune to get it to sort of bend back into tune. You have to... So if you sing well, it actually, it doesn't get to do anything so it doesn't work. Yeah. It's not going to be interesting. Yeah. I And I don't sing well, by the way. I'm not a vocalist. But like, I am not good at using

auto tune to make it sound fun and creative. You actually have to be talented at using auto tune and practice with it. So yeah, it's something you like bake into the sound before it even goes into your software. Like you can't turn it off after the fact now. Some people still do, but like a lot of people don't want to hear what their voice sounds like without it on. This is what I'm saying where it's like, I think of it more like the electric guitar, because to play electric guitar with a lot of distortion is fundamental. different than playing classical guitar. And if you ask a classical guitarist

to play a super distorted electric guitar, they might not be able to control all the feedback that it creates. They might not be aware of how to get it to sing properly. And vice versa, you know, like a fast lead guitarist and electric guitar might sound absolutely terrible on an acoustic guitar. It's a skill that you have to learn

to sing into autotune. So you actually think of singing into autotune and singing without autotune as two just utterly different skills. I think that they are related skills. Sure. But to make auto tune sound good, I think you've got to be good at it. Again, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to, I'm not arguing that you have to go to music school to learn how to do this, but you have to practice at it.

Like, it takes time. It's a skill that you have to develop as a musician. And when I do it, I don't sound good. It is common that people will use autotune to practice melodies and, you know, use it as a way of dealing with the fact that they aren't good vocalists. But, again, I think that if you want to sound like T-Pain, you're not. You have to practice singing like T-Pain. Yeah. And again, T-Pain is a great vocalist.

Share is a great vocalist. They're just not doing the same thing as Frank Sinatra was decades ago. Yeah, it's just a different way of singing. Yeah. I feel like there are going to be some people who hate that, but I find that kind of fascinating. I love that. I think there are a lot of people that are not going to like what I just said, but I really believe it. We'll put Charlie's email on the show notes.

You can tell them yourself. Thank you. I mean, I just know this through practice of working with musicians in studios, in some people are really good at using AutoTune and other people aren't. Yeah. How does that pertain to live music? Is it the same? Is it the same sort of thing? Like as Autotune has gotten more powerful, it's just present live the same way it is in recordings and it's fine. Once again, there are both ways of using Autotune live. Some people need to have that effect on when they sing because if you're Travis Scott and you're performing live in concert, that is your sound. So

they developed, Ontario's developed, an Autotune Live tool. that you can run, you know, through your microphone on a live stage. It's not baked into the microphone. It's an effect down the audio chain at some point. Sure. There is also auto-tune live used for that subtle vocal tuning to help people, you know, when you're running around on stage, it's exhausting. You might be out of breath. You're not hitting your pitches as effectively. There's all kinds of ways that vocals are enhanced to sound more like the original recording. Subtle auto-tuning is one version of that. Also playing backing tracks of like a thousand chorus vocals that are perfectly already in tune is another way that things sound more in tune when

you're at a live recording. Yeah. So you sing the one, but there's 50 other yous singing it correctly around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I want that every time I sing. That sounds great. Totally. It's like I always want my backing tracks. Yeah. That's because people expect the recordings that they hear. And when you listen to your favorite artists, they're usually in the chorus singing at least nine versions of the track to add depth width with chorusing. Like the thing that just that makes it sound big and awesome. And, you know, bringing eight extra backup singers on tour is expensive. So we might just play the backing track and add a little tuning to your vocal because you're out of breath.

So those are all different ways that people use auto tune live, either the auto tune effect or the sort of more subtle pitch correction version of it. What's the simplest, most mainstream version of that at this point? I think about the maybe video is a good metaphor, right? Where at the very high end, you have super high end video editing. software, but we've boiled it all the way down to, like, you can edit pretty successfully inside of TikTok, and it has made it available to tons of people who are doing tons of different things. Do we have that equivalent for Autotune? Like, is that just available to regular people in the way that, like, Instagram filters are? Yeah, I mean, there are iPhone apps that are, like, the Autotune effect that have been developed by the Gregory brothers, who famously made Autotune the news years ago. If you buy Apple's logic, which is their audio recording software, it comes with their own free version of pitch correction. Every software developer that makes audio tools have tried to make their own auto-tune effect, and they are cheaper than the Ontario's version.

So there's all kinds of way of getting into auto-tune if you want to try to auto-tune your vocals. It's very accessible. Okay. And is that a good thing? I feel like you would argue that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's like, are you trying to argue that there should be like, fewer paint brushes and paints in the world so that we can have more monaes. I think more creative tools for more people is great. Yeah, I support it. So there is one sort of new backlash to this that I've been thinking about a lot,

and I'm curious to get your feedback on. So one thing I see on TikTok and Instagram and everywhere else these days is like these videos of singers in their kitchen or in like a garage or, just wandering down the street, singing these beautiful soulful melodies. Do you know what I'm talking about? There's this one that's like a guy with a salt and pepper beard and he's just pouring coffee and his girlfriend is standing behind him and he just starts singing into an AirPods. And it sounds incredible.

And I'm like, first of all, the way I know this isn't real is because AirPods don't sound like that and you're lying. But like all that aside, there's been this really fascinating thing where a bunch of singers have come up and gotten a lot of fans and a lot of fame and record deals and some stuff out of these social videos. It's a very natural musician, creator way to come up. But then in every single one of their videos,

there is this giant comment section saying, oh, they're using autotune. I'd love to hear what it sounds like without autotune. It's autotune. And it's like, on the one hand, maybe the argument is who cares, but on the other hand, it's like, we're in this moment where authenticity is everything.

And also you're standing in your kitchen singing. So the idea that I'm supposed to process this like a professional recording, there's a disconnect there that I have always struggled to wrap my head around how I'm supposed to feel about this. And I'm curious, like if they were playing an electric guitar, I'd be able to see the electric guitar, right? So I'm curious how you think about how Autotune is supposed to fit in that version of music that we're in right now. Well, I think Autotune has become a sort of like catch-all for

any sound that is post-processing that makes things sound more perfect than they are. So, for example, like, if I'm singing in my kitchen, there's going to be a bunch of reverb and it's going to sound really bad, but there's all kinds of tools you can use to get rid of reverb after the fact. There are ways that you can use just EQ and compression and other very common tools in post-processing to make your voice sound better. So even if I record with an iPhone, I can get my iPhone to sound pretty close to a professional recording by having good post-processing tools. I think auto tune has just been, yeah, as the catch-all enemy for anyone who doesn't like music, which is slightly unnaturalistic. I just want to say, if you don't like the sound of

auto tune, that's fine. Like, I think it's totally fine to have your taste. If you prefer how Sinatra sings, that's cool. Like, if you prefer how punk rockers sing, that's also fine. There are different aesthetics, and Autotune is just one of them, and is the one that's really popular at the moment, if you feel that it's like it sounds unnatural, I don't like unnatural, that's fine. But it just is another way of singing. And I think that this criticism is a bit overblown. Okay.

I guess I agree to a large extent, but I do think there is something that I've, I just can't sort out inside of me that there's something about autotune that feels like hiding. That it's like if you're, if you're, because I actually, I buy the thesis that there are things that sound like autotune, but I do think, and maybe I'm wrong about this, that there is still

a real use of auto tune that is not designed to be seen, right? Like, if you're right that 90 plus percentage of music is using auto tune in some way, like, I don't know, Taylor Swift is not somebody people like, like she sounds like autotune, but she's using it. And there are people who are really pissed about that. And because they're like, oh, it's dishonest in some way, that this isn't actually what you sound like. This is, this is you, this is the equivalent of, like, putting a face filter on yourself before you post a picture, which is now another thing people have sort of visceral reactions to online in this moment of, like, fake authenticity.

And I don't know. Like, do we need, is there like, is there like an auto tune watermark that should exist on every song that uses it? I don't know. Well, okay. So you're getting at this question of, like, authenticity just with the pop star. Like, we want something about us wants our pop star to be. be sitting right next to us, our best friend, telling their personal stories. And yet we know that

they're recording it in a professional studio, working with producers and songwriters to make this presentation, which is exciting and, you know, it enhances all of our emotions. So there's always this conflict about what is real and unreal in recorded music. And I think especially in pop music, then other forms, we don't expect our actors to be themselves in a film. And yet pop stars are putting on a performance, and yet we have this expectation of they are who they say they are. You up Taylor Swift, for example. And Taylor Swift uses all kinds of vocal processing in her music. On the song Delicate, she uses a vocoder. On the song, Midnight Rain, she uses a tool called formant shifting, where she sort of shifts the voice to sound more masculine. I don't like the moments in a Taylor Swift vocal where I can hear audible pitch correction done poorly. And I've heard it done one or two times. Sometimes when you're producing a song, and you need to get it out fast for whatever reason. getting these pitch tuning tools to sound natural actually is a skill. You can get paid a good amount of money just to do the really slow version of hand-drawn auto-tune.

This is a big part of the craft. And what you're trying to do is make something which was a beautiful, emotional performance, be a little bit more in tune. And if you do it wrong, you hear this, like this weird artifact that's unpleasant. I don't like when I hear that because it's the attempt of a naturalistic performance, clearly being manipulated. You have to hide the tools you're using to clean things up in order for it to sound good. In the same way that a Photoshopped photo that is poorly done and you can see some kind of weird, like the anatomy of the person isn't right, we don't like that,

even though we completely accept that every single magazine photo is photoshopped. Interesting. So there's a real, as long as you don't make me think about it, I can rock with it kind of thing. But it's like as soon as you put this, you know, cognitive dissonance in front of my face, it's going to feel bad. But otherwise, I can sort of internalize that it's happening.

I just don't have to think about it. It's the same thing with CGI. Right? So I just watched Alien Romulus recently. Nice. And the CGI of the Android character is trying to recreate a deceased actor and it doesn't work.

It's so obviously inhuman. And even though they're an android, it just like it doesn't look right. But the rest of it's, of Alien Romulus is like full of CGI and at no point I'm like, that alien just doesn't like feel alien enough to me.

So it's all about the context in his presentation. Anything which is supposed to be completely authentic, entirely natural that is processed, we will perceive as that doesn't feel right. Things that are presented as I am a pop star on a stage and everything

about me is like perfectly composed. We accept that there is We not only accept, we expect that things are going to have been enhanced. So I just want to give everyone permission to be mad at Autotune at certain moments, but when it's intentional, let go of it, whatever. Like if someone's trying to do it, let them do it. If someone's doing it poorly, fine, criticize them. Yeah, I like it.

All right. We got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and talk about where we go from here. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. Hello. Charlie, we've gone long enough without talking about AI videos on YouTube. We've arrived. We've arrived.

So I actually want to talk about basically two different pieces of where I think things might be headed from here. One is AI and one is back to the kind of authenticity thing. Let's talk about AI first. And I bring this up because I think there is a possible future for AI that looks a lot like the arc of Autotune that you just described. Where tool becomes available. Some people use it like a tool and it's rendered most. invisible and it does, it helps in the process and it becomes a tool in the toolkit. Other people will use it incredibly aggressively and showy and it will allow new people to do new kinds of

things. Ultimately, some people will be pissed off about it, but eventually it will just be rolled into how the music industry works and may even become like the dominant aesthetic in the way that auto tune is. Could be totally wrong, but I, there's something about that rhymes to me with where AI might be headed. What do you make of that comparison? Well, we'd have to break AI down into all the various ways that it's being used for music because AI is just sort of like a process that can be used in lots of different ways, from writing lyrics to separating STEM recording so you can separate the bass and drums and vocals and instruments from a recording to generating whole songs for you from a prompt. There's so many different ways that AI is being used, some of which are maybe more

invisible. For example, like if you use chat GPT to help you find a rhyme, there's no way that I can identify that you did that, except for that sometimes chat Chbitty makes really bad rhymes. It's getting better and better. It really likes to rhyme like, do and two. And it's like, great job, Chatschiti. Yeah, that's the thing. AI songs and poorly written songs use too many perfect rhymes.

They're kind of just overly sweet, really bad, single, syllable, perfect rhymes. That's the tell. But I don't think we've seen a tool yet that is marketed as an AI tool that has become a predominant sound in popular music. There's all kinds of AI tools that I use in my music production, but I don't think of them as AI. So, like, I use a Diverb plug-in

if there's too much reverberation in a recording, and, like, technically it's using a neural net, but it doesn't really have a sonic fingerprint in the way that Autotune does. So I imagine there will be some kind of effect that will use some kind of AI neural net in its thing

that will become a sound. But the AI as a methodology is sort of too broad to say that, well, we're going to hear AI in the future. Does that make sense? It does. And I think I hadn't really thought about it like that

until you put it like that, but it is maybe the strength and weakness of AI is that it doesn't have a mark in its way. Like you can make an AI song that sounds like anything, but it's never really going to sound like itself in a way that is, I think, by design, right? Like all these tools are meant not to say, sound like themselves. They're all trying to mimic something else, and they're all generally doing a

bad job of it. And that maybe it would be more interesting if they had, like, if you went and made a song with Suno, that it sounded like something. And that maybe there is something to that that is actually missing from these tools. So you know how, like, if you try to currently make an image of a person in Dolly 3 or Mid Journey, like it kind of has, there's a style. There's a default style. And obviously, there's all kinds of way you can get around that style. But it's this weird. somewhat cartoony, magazine glossy, very thin, like very white. Well, and there are the things, right?

Like, you look at the fingers and you look at the lapels and, like, they have their tells in that kind of way. Yeah, exactly. So right now, if you use tools like Suno or Udio, they do have their tells. And perhaps, you know, in 20 years in the future, people are like, I want to use classic Suno because I like the things that it does wrong. Wait, what are those tells? Like, how would you describe those? Okay, so first of all, a lot of it's trained on actually really low sample rate and bit rate MP3s just to like reduce the size of the data.

And so there is this like grainy, hissy sound. Like it sounds like a bad MP3 from 1997 being played in Winamp. Or maybe like more relatable for folks would be like if you turn on AM radio, AM radio has a sound where it's just like not quite high fidelity. There's a low fidelity sound. the sounds of instruments are strange. Like, okay, take for example a horn section. If you try to make a funk song with horns, the great thing about a horn section is nobody hits the note

at exactly the same time, at exactly the right pitch. The excitement is the subtle differences of, you know, eight horns all trying to do their thing at almost the exact same time. And that actually, that inhuman imperfection is what makes it really good. AI oftentimes just like makes it all too perfect. Same with vocals. The vocal sound actually pre-tuned. And so you can identify these things. In addition to the vocals are, the lyrics are, have way too many perfect rhymes, et cetera, et cetera. I actually assigned my students to NYU. One of their assignments was go to Suno, prompt it to write a song, grade that

song based off of everything that you've learned in class, now write your own song from the same prompt and all of my freshman students wrote significantly better songs than the Udo and Suno song. And most of them threw them out entirely. I asked them to try to incorporate elements of them into their track and they're like, it's too hard, it's too bad. But maybe this badness could be something that we like in the future. Yeah.

And that comes back to the other thing I want to talk about with this authenticity thing. I think a theory that I'm starting to hear more and more from people is that the next phase of culture in so many ways is going to be a spin all the way back to, again, whatever you want to think of as, like, quote, unquote, authentic stuff. It's called punk rock. Yeah, it's right. And we're going to, people are going to deliberately start releasing vocals that sound worse because they are more honest somehow.

And we're going to go back to, you know, not using the internet in the ways that we've been using it. like this idea of just sort of eschewing all of this stuff because it has made us not ourselves anymore and going back to like, I don't know, I'm going to just put a bunch of instruments in a room and record like the Beatles 60 years ago and that that is the next thing. Who famously used the music studio for all of its wild creative tools and use all kinds of post-processing vocal tools like Verisbee and etc. So I'm just saying we've always been doing this. But yes, I hear where you're going. Again, again, the question of like, how far back do you have to go to find something, quote, unquote, authentic is a good one.

We're all going to play the mandolin, guitar, and banjo and violin, and, you know, sing in old-timey bands is what you're saying. Yeah, and like if I sang flat on the take, it's going to be flat on the record. And I would say, historically speaking, there have been a lot of people who want us to go that way, and we have never, ever, ever gone that way. But I do think there's a reasonable argument that AI is like the end of a certain road of inauthenticity that maybe we are due for a pushback the other way. I think that that's a completely acceptable expectation. Like, we've seen that trend many times in the history of popular music. In the rise of electronic recording and the electric guitar, louder sounds and rock and roll, you had the folk resurgence. after the super highly produced era of the 1980s,

you had grunge as a pushback to that. So I think it's completely likely that we're going to see new sounds and styles emerging that do try to harken to our most human sound as a pushback to anything that is AI. At the same time, I wonder if we've already reached peak authentic. Because if you go on TikTok today, I feel like every other thing on TikTok is the TikTok shop, is some sort of advertisement.

And it's all filmed the exact same way. It doesn't matter if it's a creator with 10 likes or if it's progressive insurance. It's all like, hey, I'm holding my phone. I'm backlit. I'm just like talking naturally, just shooting the breeze, whatever. Oh, and by the way, this is progressive insurance. And so it's already been co-that, like the authentic human thing in video has already been co-opted by advertisers. So where people go next, I think it might be weird.

It might be something like Autotune that is the effect of the next generation of music. Do you have any theory about what that might be in this world? Like, what are the teens doing that is going to seem crazy to the old folks in a couple of years? They're still using a lot of Autotune. It's not going anywhere right now. It seems like we have like a, I joked about everybody playing The Mandolin, and there does seem to be like a lumineer-style resurgence and the music of like Noah Kahn is a great example.

I'm a pretty season of the sticks and I talk your mom, she forgot that I exist. I was going to say, thank you stick season. Yeah, exactly. So I don't think there is the emergent thing yet. People are still having a lot of fun making music on their computers because it's the easiest way to record. So I think we're seeing more a like branching of many

different kinds of expression than a solidification around one sound. Can I tell you my theory? And I'm very curious. I want to hear it. I think of this. My theory is that the, like, voice memo demo is going to become an actual honest to God, like genre of music. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. I think that you see this all the time, right, where, like, the, a song will come out and then, like, Charlie Puth does this all the time. Yeah. He'll go on TikTok or whatever at some late night show and play his demo of, you know, of, a song. the song where he's just like sort of inventing the melody in his head and trying to get it down into his phone. And

that part of me is starting to wonder like maybe we're going to get to the point where the polished thing and the unpolished thing actually get to live next to each other. If instead of there just being sort of one canonical finished version of the thing, what we actually want is lots of different

experiences of this same kind of thing all the way down to just like the artist riffing into their phone for a minute. And that that like we want to experience all of that as fans. The new Halsey record has multiple tracks that are exactly that, that are basically like voice memos and demos and things that are interspersed. And, you know, that has a long history of like interlude tracks on hip-pop tracks

that are kind of like, oh, this is a phone call. But I like that. I mean, I want to just point out one other trend that has popped up as well as, like, the return to 1920s, 30s jazz. Yeah. Or like what you might call classical pop with the artist like, Louis-Vé, who are making things that are a false nostalgia for music, which is 100 years old

and that young people are into. So, yeah, there's all kinds of routes. I don't know if I really want to hear a lot of people's voice memos, though. As we look at, you know, we're 27 years into Auto Tune, which is a long time in music genre and in pop music. Do you think, if you fast forward a while,

we will look back at, this is kind of an auto tune era in the way that we've had sort of distinct eras in music, and it'll linger, but the idea of auto tune being kind of the dominant sound of music will go away and will be replaced by something else, and this will be the auto tune moment, or is this just going to be how music is forever? What's amazing about all listeners,

whether they're a trained musician or not, is they can turn on a recording and often tell you, oh, that's like an 80s thing, and I don't like the 80s. And the reason why they can do that is because snare drums were produced in a very specific way for the 1980s. There's lots of other production techniques that sound 1980s. And every era has these sonic artifacts of their moment. And they place them in time the same way that a point-and-shoot Kodak photograph from the early 2000s screams early 2000s.

You can even have AIs generate things that look like point-ons shoot Kodak photographs, which are actually having a comeback. I've been at birthday parties recently where people handing these things around to get that aesthetic. Yeah, people are out here buying like cool pics, camera. from 2003 again. Exactly. And so I think that, you know, 20 years in the future, it may be that autotune

is no longer the predominant sound. I think that's probably likely. But when someone's like, but I want to sound like, you know, 2008, they're going to use that again as a, you know, as an active sort of creative nostalgia.

So I think that we have been in the auto tune decades. We'll probably move beyond it. But in the same way that like, the electric guitar is not the most popular instrument today, but it's still ubiquitous in recording. I think that, Autotune will be around in some kind of form,

and it might just sort of fade into the background and pop forward later on. Who knows? Okay. But right now, we're still very much in the Autotune era. I mean, I think the coolest record of the year was Brat by Charlie X, CX, and she admits that she has no longer has the ability

to sing without Autotune, because it's just so part of her sound, she's like, I don't sound good with Autotune anymore. And that record is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, if Autotune is what it took for us to get Brad, I'll take it. We'll be all right. Amen.

All right, Charlie, thank you so much as always. This is really fun. Thanks. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to Charlie again for being here, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's more on everything we talked about in the show notes. I highly recommend the pitchfork story on the history of Autotune. There's a ton of good stuff in there.

I'll also link to Switched on Pop. So many great episodes of that show that you should listen to. Truly cannot recommend it highly enough. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other auto tune songs that belong in the canon of autotune over the years, please tell me. You can always email us at Vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866, Verge11.

We love hearing from you. We have a bunch of fun hotline stuff coming up between now and the end of the year, so get your questions in. This show is produced by Liam James, Willpore, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday and Friday. Lots of news, lots of stuff going on. Lots of fun things to talk about.

We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Off the top of your head, give me an intro to auto tune playlist. For somebody who is like, I want to experience autotune, what are some songs you would just recommend off the top of your head?

Okay, well, I would first go to other vocal processing techniques and you'd have to listen to like Cropworks, Trans Europe Express using the vocoder. You have to put harder, better, faster, stronger from Daft Punk, not autotune technically. You have to listen to some talk box like Show Me the Way by Peter Frampton, Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi,

California Love by Tupac and Dre, and then, you know, obviously you need to have lollipop on there because, I mean, what is Autonauton without lollipop? You need, what else has to go on there? Certainly, Travis Scott highest in the room, the entire album of Brat, but if any one song, I'm more of a 365 than a 360,

so I'm going to say 365. Drake's in my feelings shares believe T-Pain's I'm sprung and I'm not going to recommend Maroon 5's She will be left You also left out

Blue by Eiffel 65 Which I find personally outrageous But No that's because I mean that is I would have to have like a consumer warning On that playlist If you put Blue on there

Because it is a devilish earworm But I did say Lil' Wain's Lollipop So you know That's true Proceed with caution. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with me and David Pierce on the Vergecast. Please subscribe to the Vergecast anywhere you get podcasts. We'll see you again next week.

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