Switched on Pop - Do You Believe in Life After Autotune?

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Auto-Tune may be the most divisive effect in music. Artists have protested it publicly at the Grammys, and critics have derided the effects for its inauthentic reproduction of the voice. And yet, nearly a decade since Jay-Z prophesied the death of Auto-Tune, the sound is alive and thriving in contemporary pop and hip-hop. Journalist Simon Reynolds has written a definitive history of Auto-Tune for Pitchfork that fundamentally changed how we hear this sound. This deep dive criss crosses geology, technology, and the evolution of pop as we know it. Songs Discussed:Cher - BelieveKaty Perry - FireworkRihanna - DiamondsFuture - F*ck Up Some CommasEmma Robinson - Stay (Cover) Imogen Heap - Hide And Seek Zapp & Roger - Doo Wa Ditty (Blow That Thing) T. Pain - Chopped N Screwed ft. Ludacris Lil Wayne - “How To Love”Kanye - “Heartless”The Black Eyed Peas “Boom Boom Pow”Jay-Z - Death Of Auto-TuneElvis - Mystery TrainThe Beatles - Tomorrow Never KnowsWhispering Jack Smith - Baby FaceKesha - Tik Tok Bon Iver - WoodsFuture & Juice WRLD - Jet Lag ft. Young Scooter Shek Wes - Mo BambaThe Carters - Apeshit Further Reading:Simon Reynolds - “How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music" Simon Reynolds -Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm musicologist

Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And we have a very special guest with us today. The author of a recent article in Pitchfork called How Autotune Revolutionize the Sound of Popular Music. Do you mind introducing yourself? Hi, it's Simon Reynolds here. We have Simon Reynolds in the studio and we're so excited to go through this incredibly in-depth, probably the most encyclopedic thing that's been written on Autotune up till this point. And it's great for us because this is, I think, a feature of pop music that is so ubiquitous that maybe we've never really actually paused to delve into it. So now here's our chance.

To begin, we have to go back two decades to the birth of Autotune, which was, of course, in Shares' 1998, single Believe. Is it crazy that what I hear in that is the producers of Britney Spears Toxic probably took that little guitar line. No, I don't think you're crazy. I think this song is an oar source for so much pop music to follow. That's not over here. So, Simon, even though this was maybe the first use of auto tune in a pop single,

the producers of this song did not want to disclose that. fact. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, they put out a story that it was a certain brand of vocoder pedal they were using. And I don't know if it was the very first time. It was certainly the first time that anyone used autotune in a blatant way. Like, you know, it had been around maybe on the market for a year and people used it in the way it was meant to be done, which was to sort of imperceptibly correct errors in singing or actually other kind of instrumental performances, but mostly singing. And this was the first time someone used it in a very deliberate, conspicuous blatant way as an effect. And most people hearing it, I mean, I think remember hearing it, I thought it was

a vocoder because I didn't have any other sort of terms of reference for what was actually changing her voice, you know. At that time, what's striking about it is that we just thought it was a gimmick, you know, that was in one song, didn't realize that it would become this widespread thing that became the default setting for most pop music. Indeed, it was not a vocoder as the producers misinformed the public. It was this new device called autotune, which, as Simon says, was meant to be inconspicuous, but in this song was really pushed to the foreground. At this point, we should talk about the origins of Autotune itself. This was invented by someone who I'm sure every pop fan is familiar with, Andy Hildebrand, founder of Antares Audio. Can you tell us a little bit

about this mysterious inventor of Autotune, Simon? Yeah, I mean, he is quite well known in terms of someone involved in music technology, because generally speaking, only musicians care about stuff on people who work in recording studios. But, you know, there have been profiles of them because it is such a sort of big story. And his background is quite interesting because he started out. He's a sort of hardcore mathematician, like, you know, does stuff that most normal people can't understand at all, incomprehensible equations and algorithms. And he started out making a fortune for himself, working in the oil industry, where he

developed equations or, I don't even know, algorithms that, you know, can. interpret the data that comes from sending sound signals underground. It's called reflection seismology and you kind of, it can tell you what's down there, you know, in terms of oil deposits. So, you know, this saves the oil industry a lot of money because they can drill exactly in the right place because they've got a technology that can tell by these sort of, I don't know, reflections of sound waves what the best locations are to extract from. And so this, you know, he made a lot of money doing that. He built up a very successful company. And then he chucked it all in and wanted to do something involved in what his actual real passion was, which was music.

He was actually an accomplished flute player. That was his major passion alongside math. And he founded this company and he was trying to think of what shall I invent. And the story goes that at a dinner party of people in that field, colleagues and friends, someone said, why can't you come up with something that helped me sing in tune? And that sort of lodged in the back of his head and he thought, yeah, there is a demand. for this. I could use these same sort of equations or algorithms or whatever that I've been using to find oil to sort of instantly correct bad singing and push it back in tune. So what you're saying is that the petroleum industry gave us auto tune. Yeah. And which is funny because there's often

things that end up in the entertainment field actually have like an industrial or even military origin, like the vocode who actually came out of attempts to, uh, encrypt speech, you know, and then people realized during World War II, I think it was. And so this is like a knock-on effect of, you know, big oil is sort of either ruining music or or giving us a whole field. As with the vocoder, we have in Autotune an invention that was made for one purpose that then is repurposed by musicians for something totally different. I think, Simon, you do a nice job of introducing the different, how Autotune can be used.

use to create these effects. And in order to illustrate this key feature of autotune, which is the retuning speed, in other words, how fast the auto tune program will correct your off pitch to the desired pitch, you can do that slowly or you can do that quickly, or you can do that instantaneously. So in order to illustrate these different retuning speeds, I thought we could just listen to a beautiful recording I made of myself singing an unforgettable gorgeous melody. Here it is without any effects whatsoever. La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la Thank you.

Thank you. I'll take it, Simon. Okay, a little breathy. Wow, tough crowd here. Okay, we move now to just throwing some auto tune on this recording with a very very slow retuning speed. So it'll be a little subtle. It'll slowly move the notes to the quote-unquote correct pitch. La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la instantly better. Yeah and it's also very subtle you wouldn't notice anything was being done there really

no no hopefully it still sounds like my pure voice but just a little better. All right now we're going to do a fast auto tuning speed where it's very going to quickly going to shift the note to the, again, the correct pitch. La la la la, la, la. La la la la la. That sounds like a mistake. Yeah. I've listened to so much auto tune music.

That just sounds kind of like a normal thing you'd hear on the radio, but it is clearly artificial. I feel like it's almost not enough of it, right? Because we're actually so used to what you talk about in your article, which is like the full me goes. You need to like, or future. You need to really crank it up, I think. Well, we're in luck because I have gone full migos.

This is the effect now of the instantaneous retuning. Zero speed, yeah. Zero speed, exactly. So this goes just immediately from the incorrect note to the correct note. La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la. It's a hit. It's a hit. If I got this software, I would just spend all day messing around with it.

I just could never get tired of that sound, I think. My family could, though. So I think in these examples, we hear the different ways that autotune can be used. In its original intention to simply give a little more absolute pitch and depth to the voice, and that I think we can hear in so much pop music. It's ubiquitous. It's very subtle, as in a recording like Katie Perry's Firework, or in the music of Rihanna.

What do you think? Are we able to hear the use of auto tune in these recordings? I think we just got so accustomed to it being the normal sound of pop music that it probably doesn't stand out anymore. It's just everything is slightly perfected given that, you know, the soaringness of it is enhanced and there's a sort of glisten to the vocals. Doing things to the vocal and improving them and EQing them and putting the subtle bit of reverb or whatever is this been done in recording studios with pop music before you autotune.

It's not a natural voice that we hear in records anyway. But autotune in this more inconspicuous use of it has just added an extra layer of glisten, I think, to people's voices. I love that word glisten. And I think that what you just described, Simon, the manipulation of the voice back to the beginnings of recorded music is something we'll talk about more in the second half. I feel like the one thing that I can definitely hear

is stuff that I'm not hearing, which are minor fluctuations in the voice. So what we hear a lot in pop vocal is actually very little vibrato. Vibrato is not popular in pop. It is popular in opera, not popular in pop. Now, of course, there are some classic vibratoes, but when you're hearing these long notes on the Katie Perry, they are perfect and straight and flat.

And likely, just because we are human beings, we are organic material, there's going to be fluctuations in each individual note, whether it's just slight changes in breath or whatever it may be, and those just get smoothed over. So we're not hearing something, and that is sort of the evidence of auto tune for me. Yeah, these long, sustained perfect notes,

what the writer Dan Barrow called The Saw is like a kind of thing that is something that people really seem to like in pop music today. And maybe it's a side effect, to some extent, of all the vocal talent contest shows on TV where there's this sort of emphasis on an almost athletic prowess in singing. But autotune enables people who would find hard to do that in the live context to actually do these incredible piercing perfect sustained notes.

Moving from the invisibility of autotune to its ultimate conspicuousness, we would have to look at some of the contemporary rappers who use autotune and especially use that instantaneous retuning feature to really change their voice. A great example would be the rapper Future in a song like F up some commas. Not even the most conspicuous version I've ever heard. Oh yeah, and we'll talk more. Simon has some amazing examples of how Autotune has sort of seeped into hip-hop, which we'll get into in a second.

I'm just trying to establish the ubiquity of this style now, to the point where we can even find artists like Emma Robinson. Will you tell us a little about Emma Robinson, Simon? Yes, Emma Robinson is someone who doesn't use Autotune, but she's learned to simulate the sound of Autotune because it's such a dominant, hegemonic even sound on the radio. and recording engineers talk about artifacts, which are like these sort of obviously digital effects

that usually are trying to avoid, but she actually can produce them using her own sort of vocal tract. I'm really excited for trying to hear this. Simon, I hadn't heard of Emma Robinson before reading your article. Let's have a listen. My brains aren't exploded all over them. I'm so sorry, Simon.

I've ruined your home. That's exceptional. It reminds me, it has a sort of like, yodily kind of thing, but instead of hitting the next octave, it does something really weird that it can only be described, I guess, as you said, is vocal artifacting, but it's not digital. That's insane. Yeah, it's pretty weird, isn't it? And I wonder how she does it, you know, and how long it took her to teach herself to make

those sorts of sound. Emma, if you're out there, you have an open invitation to join us here on Switched on Pop. Now, as Simon said, Autotune is not the first accidental instrument in the history of music technology. We have the vocoder popularized by artists more recently, like Imogene Heap. I don't think for everyone it might be obvious

what's the difference between Autotune and the vocoder. Autotune on zero or on max speed sounds strange as does vocoder. So I think the important thing to know The vocate or hearing is actually harmonies where someone's actually playing a keyboard and then singing, basically, you could just say singing into that keyboard and it captures all of the phonemes of your speech, but the actual pitch is whatever you're playing on the keyboard. But they both sound weird and it can be difficult for non-musicians to identify, but they are different instruments and totally different techniques. There's also a third, confusing as well, there's a third instrument, which is actually invented by, I think it's made by a country musician whose name, I'm blanking on, but. It's most famously associated with people like Pete Frampton,

Roger Tratman from Zapp, which is the talk box. And that works in a completely different way where you feed the signal from your instrument, usually an electric guitar, but it could be a keyboard, through this sort of tube into your mouth, and then the mouth becomes a resonant chamber for the sound. It blends with your voice,

and then it goes out through the vocal microphone. So all those songs that Pete Frampton had in the mid-70s, like Show Me the Way, have these little, and Talkbox guitar solos in Roger Troutman in Zapp in their own songs like more bounce of the ounce, but also later in the Dr. Dre song, California Love, where he has a cameo appearance, doing this similar thing.

They're all sort of easy to confuse because they all basically sound like cyborg singers, really, but they're actually operating different ways. And if you, you know, work in the music field or recording field, you know, they're very distinct sounds, you know, that you choose for different reasons. I don't have California love, but I do have one of my favorite Roger Troutman recordings to use as an example here. I hear a lot of modern Bruno Mars borrowing from that exact sound.

So yeah, Simon points out, you know, devices like the vocoder in the talk box have been appearing in rap for decades at this point. But Autotune introduces this new element. We can hear it very early on, actually surprisingly perhaps you cite me. maybe the first example of auto tune being used in hip-hop or with rapping in a song by the Europop band, Eiffel 65, called Too Much of Heaven. I've never heard this. When did this come out? I think it came out in 2000 or 2001.

Yeah, I was a bit surprised. I remember that song at the time and I actually liked it and bought it. What is buying music? Yeah, I even bought the CD single of it, which is like a, you know, fantastically obscure ancient artifact at this point. Yeah, you know, it's basically a point. pop song that has a bit of rapping, a sort of semi-wrapping in the middle. So whether hip-hop fans would, and scholars of hip-hop would accept it as rapping, I don't know, but it seemed to me as the very

first example of it that I could find anyway. Though Eiffel 65 may be the surprising forbearers of this technique, it is undoubtedly T-Pain, who really turns it into an art in the hip-hop form. We could play any variety of T-Pain tracks here, but I'm going to go with one of my all-time favorites chopped and screwed. I feel like I'm a happy room of your favorite street of club you're kissing on your neck making you feel like she's so in love I feel like the

T-pane effect is of course more than just autotune. He's got harmonizers, he's got phasers, he's got other things on his voice which are taking the auto-tune effect and maximizing it even further. But the heart of it, yes, auto-tune. And he's used, I think he's using effects like, chopping and screwing effects from DJ Screw.

That is a Houston-based aesthetic of sort of slowing down hip-hop tracks and putting little interruptions in the beach, you know, jolts, you know. So, and I guess there's some kind of lewd kind of metaphor going on there as well. It's absolutely lewd and at the same time, very tender. I can't recommend enough everyone going out and listening to Chopped and Screw, especially the ludicrous guest feature. So T-Pain, there's something perhaps that's kind of a novelty about it, and yet something surprising happens as a result of T-Pain's adoption of Autotune.

Simon, what effects does T-Pain's use of this new technology have on hip-hop in general? Well, a lot of rappers just really like what he was doing, and I think he almost became a bit like their generation's equivalent to someone like Roger Troutman from Zapp, like someone they thought was like this sort of robot lover man, you know, doing these very futuristic but sexy slow jam type tunes like the one we just heard, chopped and screwed.

And so Little Wayne did some things in this vein. Snoop Dog did a track called Sensual Seduction that was very much like T-Pain influenced. Kenny West just loved it and eventually did a whole album,

8088 and heartbreak in that vein. And it seemed to sort of, for some reason the autotune sound seemed to open up this sort of this sensitivity in rappers where they would talk about feelings and being sad and heartbroken and get quite sort of soppy and mordling almost you autotune and somehow enabled them

I wouldn't say exactly hiding through autotune but somehow that technique freed them up actually freed them up to try singing which you know you wouldn't a rapper can't necessarily sing but having this pitch correction device that also made you sound kind of otherworldly and angelic. It enabled them to sort of croon and do things that they wouldn't maybe have tried before. The effects of auto tune on the sound and style of hip-hop, like Simon says, are immediately obvious if we listen to a song like How to Love by Little Wayne.

And the paragon of this new song, style, I think Simon correctly identifies as Kanye West 808 and heartbreaks. A song like Heartless is a perfect example. At this point, in the late 2000s, Autotune has seeped into every corner of the pop music industry, both invisibly and highly conspicuously. And you know what's coming next. When we come back after a short break, we will explore the backlash to Autotune. 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.

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A song like Boom Boom Pow by The Black Peas represents both the possibilities and maybe the excesses that are afforded by Autotune. At this point, are we at the death of Autotune? Yeah, it's sort of like it's everywhere. And I really like that song, and I particularly like the lyric where he goes, like I've got that future flow. I've got that digital spit because that's such a perfect description of what Autodune does, which takes the human voice, which comes out of the mouth. which has more bacteria in it than any other part of the body, amazingly. But it sort of makes it this sort of post-human,

pristine, beautiful but sterile thing. So digital spit sort of poetically captures, you know, what's happening with autotune. The Black Eyed P is, you know, is very much doing this almost retro future thing. And I can remember feeling like there's too much autotune. I've had enough. Surely it's over now.

I wouldn't say disagree necessarily when Jayce did, you know, his song, death of autotune. I felt like it too much of a good thing. You weren't alone as Charlie adambraided in 2009, Jay-Z drops his own kind of response to the Autotune craze death of Autotune. Listening now in context, I hadn't noticed the opening. It's like it's so on the nose.

He's showing off. He's bragging. He doesn't need Autotune. Oh, or isn't it that? I read it more like he's intentionally out of, of tune and isn't trying to hide it. Exactly. He doesn't need to hide it because he's such a star and look at this.

I can sing completely out of tune. We're on the same page. Or I would say, I would say, I would say, I mean, after reading Simon's article, I would say more it's like this expression of let's return to authenticity, right? Yeah, I mean, for a lot of hip-hop purists, you know, rapping, hip-hop is about the lyricism of the MC, you know, when rap songs started to have R&B choruses, that was considered like selling out to pop music and there was a certain sort of feeling that it was all about having fantastic lyrics and Jay-Z says none of my tunes have melodies in, you know, there was a kind of a backlash

against this sort of popified, melodic form of rap music. And Jay-Z was far from alone. Simon reports Death Cab for Cutie protested the use of auto tune at the Grammy Awards. They said, let's really try to get music back to its roots of actual people singing and sounding like human beings. in 2010, time names it one of the 50 worst inventions of the modern era, and T. Payne sort of steps forward to assert the craft and talent that goes into his use of Autotune in a wonderful quote that Simons pulled out. He said, a lot of math went into that S word, he said, it would take us an effing billion minutes to explain to regular mother effers, but I really studied this S word. I know why it catches certain notes and why it doesn't catch certain notes.

notes. On second thought, reading that quote on a family-friendly podcast may not have been the best idea. And then even pioneers of vocal effects like daft punk in 2013 kind of go back to real voices and instruments on their album Random Access Memory. So there does seem to be this genre-wide backlash against Autotune. And Simon has a great line, I think, that captures this state of affairs. He calls it a deeply conflicted confusion in our desires, simultaneously craving the real and the true while continuing to be seduced by digital's perfection and the facility and flexibility of use it offers. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you can see that sort of contradiction playing out in a lot of people live their lives where

there's this obsession with analog formats like vinyl, but the vinyl always comes with download codes. And so you just think, like, well, are people actually, in practice, actually just listening, you know, on their phone or tablet, whatever? And the vinyl is just there to sit there as a sort of symbol of some golden age of, you know,

the recording industry and rock when it meant something, you know, it's very odd, you know. Nowadays, with rap records, you can't buy the CD of many important rap records by people like Future or Young Thug, but you can get the vinyl version, you know. It's very odd. There's like, you guys,

by it as an MP3, or you stream it, or you can just buy the vinyl version of like 40 bucks, you know, which just seems absurd and seems like a purely symbolic act that in practice people are not actually listening to, I wouldn't have thought. It's so fun to look at this debate with, this is happening when Death of Autotune is like 2010. 2009. So looking at this argument with a little bit of space makes me realize the absurdity of the criticism of digital as not real. as you're pointing out, like, analog has this sort of realness to it, as if we aren't this corporeal form making transient sounds that are being somehow captured onto some sort of mechanical device.

Whether it's made with tubes and circuits or it's some sort of digital algorithm, it's still a transmission of our actual human experience, which is not real. And so the realness is really almost like a nostalgia for a certain sonic timbre. We like the sound of vinyl, but it's not better or worse. It's just a different form of transmitting what is not the original. It's a very, like at this point, for me, these debates are very silly. It's a pretty contrived thing, having a slab of vinyl that's had these, you know, grooves pressed into it, and then you drag a sort of a needle made of carbonized, whatever, like diamond or something, and it produces these vibrations that are then sent through speakers.

you know, that's a fairly complicated electromechanical process. It's not natural. It's not like having someone in front of you singing, you know. And so really the artifice of the human voice and of all music begins with all recording, really. Already with recording we're into

some kind of spooky unreality, you know. It's a great point. You know, we can go back through the history of popular music and find innumerable moments where people have been manipulating the sound of their voice. Simon, you point out, we can hear this in Elvis's early recordings, the use of the slapback effect on his vocals.

And we can definitely hear it in recordings by The Beatles like Tomorrow Never Knows, where John Lennon runs his voice through the Leslie speaker that you would have normally used on a Hammond B3 organ. We can go back even further. In the 1920s, the art of crooning was entirely dependent on recording technology. crooning, which was in this incredibly popular style from artists like Bing Crosby and Rudy Valley, was all about taking advantage of the intimacy that the microphone gave to create this entirely new vocal approach. Here, epitomized by one of my favorite crooners, whispering Jack Smith.

Baby, baby, you've got the cutest little baby face. There's not another one who could take your place. Baby face. My poor heart is... jumping, and you should have started something. Something we need to acknowledge is the artifice of all recording in which relative volumes of instruments are manipulated, right? There's no way that you can sing with that quietness over a piano. The piano still has some energy in it, and you can actually hear that the level on the piano is brought down. We have the same thing when we listen to any modern rock music that has both huge epic drums and an acoustic guitar at the same time. This is an impossibility.

You couldn't do that in a live performance without some kind of amplification, and, in recorded music, we level all these things so that the guitar is way louder than it's actually physically possible compared to the drums. And so we're hearing, I think in all recorded music, we just have to acknowledge the creative flexibility that we have with these tools, particularly with the voice, and there is no real voice. The voice is sitting somehow in a creative medium of sound. I think that's well set, Charlie, and it's definitely evidenced by one of the earliest recordings ever made in 1890 when Thomas Edison tried to make a talking doll. And I'm sorry because when I'm about to play may give you nightmares

for the rest of your life. This is the only recently did they figure out a way to actually play these 1890 recordings. And this is what it sounds like. So fast forwarding now back to the 2010s, Simon, you identify another complaint against the use of Autotune, which is that it might depersonalize singers. It sort of erases their identity. And I wonder what might be a rejoinder to that claim, that autotune depersonalizes singers? Well, it's certainly true that it seems to have some kind of effect where it kind of flattens out the sort of natural harmonics or timbre characteristics of a singer and makes them a bit more uniform. So I noticed it, say, with Britney Spears' recordings where, you know, she's got this wonderful sort of husky.

croak of a voice. But by the time of early 2010, 2011, until the world ends and songs like that, she's sounding pretty sort of anonymous. A lot of that huskiness has sort of been ironed out of a voice. But I think what happens is that there's more emphasis on sort of phrasing and rhythmic tricks and just sort of personality that comes to the fore and sort of almost triumphs against the standardising effects of autotune. And particularly with rapping, you have, increasingly really idiosyncratic emcees just doing, you know, really oddball stuff, almost using the basic template of Autotune as a standard thing that everyone has. And then within that, they flex this sort of really quirky personality.

I love that because it suggests not that AutoTune necessarily depersonalizes singers, but that it creates a new imperative for singers to find a way to express themselves through and with this technology to become cyborgs, essentially. And I think you do a really nice job of pointing out that certain singers have this ability to make Autotune really blend with their voices. Certainly Katie Perry and Rihanna, who we listened to earlier, and someone who you point out as a kind of a master of using Autotune would be Kesha. Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy.

I'm going to hit this city. Let's go. Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle. You know, Kesha's the immediate sort of proof that personality thrives. I mean, she used it to sort of amp up this sort of bratty, somewhat annoying persona, you know, that as soon as one of her songs came when you instantly knew it was Kesha. And there are all kinds of clever little ticks throughout that song using different vocal effects that amp up this instantly identifiable Kesha character, really.

It's like a persona. And she's kind of swaggering and needling at their listeners' ear with these sort of borderline, annoying vocal tricks. Something surprising happens at this point. Despite the backlash against Autotune, the claims that it depersonalizes and ruins the authenticity of popular music, auto tune starts to enter the bastions of authenticity. And I'm thinking particularly here of styles like indie rock. We see artists like Radiohead, Grimes. and even Bonie Ver starting to use autotune as in his song Woods.

It's probably a good point to point out that although we're using the word autotune all the time, in actual fact, autotune has become sort of like the most well-known brand name for a whole group of vocal technologies. There's melodyne, there's way, there's about six or seven others. I think Bonnevere might have been using something called prismizer on that song. I'm not actually totally sure, but essentially, you know, to most people's ears, it sounds like autotune. And they're all more or less working in the same way of correcting pitch. Some of them do really complicated things in terms of what people call vocal design,

like melodine allows you to kind of graphically present vocals or instrumental sounds on a screen, and you just kind of stretch them using the cursor, and you twist them, and you put all kinds of wobbles in them, and you can move them around and change the phrasing. accenting, their sort of rhythmic articulation of a performance in these very subtle or extreme ways. So yeah, Bonnevere, you know, was one of a number of sort of left field indie alternative musicians who thought, actually there is something interesting about this. This, you know, it's the dominant sound of pop music. Maybe I can take it on and use it. And that tune, he uses it to sort of I had a new dimension to what he already was doing,

which is this sort of kind of lonesome, folk-y, introspective pop. One of the things that your appreciation of this form has helped me realize in this track, particularly, is you have this naked vocal, and as you put it, he's using it as an artistic technique. It sounds like he's perfected his vibrato to work with the auto-tune effect

so that there's these moments where he's holding out these long notes, and then there's these little-da-da-l kind of... Wobbles, yeah. Yeah, he's got these wobbles. and those wouldn't happen naturally had he not been thinking about the auto tune, the effect that's going to go on the vocal and the affect that he's trying to get across. So I never had appreciated it at that level of depth because it's actually hard to get the auto tune to do the thing that it's not supposed to do.

It's supposed to put you in tune and all of a sudden he's intentionally making it go out of tune for a pseudo-vibrato effect. This has become a move that quite a lot of people from the sort of Bonaville, pitchfork sort of world have kind of done, you know, Vampire Weekend did it. This year, Steve Malcolmis of Pabin, who, you know, couldn't be more archetypally indie rock and, you know, was in the 90s associated with lofi, you know, this sort of idea of homespun recording approach that's full of distortion and he sort of supposedly more honest and authentic and gritty and real sounds.

You know, he embraced on his latest album, he embraced Autotune and did things with it. So it's become this sort of move where the smarter sort of people in the Indie. the alternative world of thought, let's give it a go. Let's see if we can, you know, use it to bring out some dimension of what we're doing. But also they probably think maybe we'd get on the radio more better, you know. So great. At this point, I'll just reiterate something Simon said that's important, right? We're talking about autotune, but we're using it, as you mentioned in your article, kind of the way you would use a brand name like Kleenex or Xerox to really stand in for any type of pitch correction of which they're now, you know, numerous available to artists.

Auto tune at this point is used for commercial purposes, for artistic purposes. It is ubiquitous. I don't think it's going anywhere. I thought actually as perhaps maybe an ill-designed exercise here, we could pick a number, Charlie, between 1 and 100, if you would. 72. Okay. So now we're going to go to the Billboard Hot 100. As of the date of this recording, we're going to go to the 72nd song.

on the Billboard Hot 100, which is Jetlag by Future and Juice World featuring Young Scooter. You couldn't pick something that was more auto-tuned, I think, than that really. Probably it's the most autotuned tune in the top 72. I was going to say we don't even have to listen to it. We just know, but we should. I just got a joke. I just got a chore. I just called a blah.

Let's do one more. Simon, can we get a number between one and 100? 16. 16. Let's scroll to 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. And we have Mobamba by Sheck West. Let's listen to that for a moment. Shack West got so many flow.

I know as of this recording, this is still the number one most listened to track on Spotify this week. And it's on the charts. What's interesting about the auto tune, for me, I don't know what you're hearing, but it sounds like a case of not using enough auto tune. Like, the song has this sort of authentic out of pitch sound. And then you can hear on those long notes, some of those long notes do stay in tune an abnormal amount.

And then other notes are completely out of tune. I can't figure out how they're using it. What are you hearing? Yeah, it sounded quite sort of wavery and borderline grating, which is clearly deliberate. Yeah, I wouldn't have said that was an exceptionally heavily autotune song. But it's, you know, it's hard to say now. Like, you can't really trust your ears. I think it's one of the effects of autotune.

Yeah, it'd be curious. You know, if we had picked a country song, I wonder if we would have heard autotune, probably. Again, maybe in a way so subtle that we wouldn't be able to put our finger on it. But chances are, in any track on the Billboard Hot 100, we're hearing some kind of auto tune. One of the things I know about from modern vocal production, and you talk about in your article is that I think he's like 99% of songs

we should accept are likely auto tune. It's often happening depending on the style of music in a way which is meant to emphasize the performance over the effect of autotune. So on a country track, it's very likely that the song will first be melodined where they use that sort of exacting pitch correction. You can do every little note. You can add vibrato. And it's going to be done in a way which should be subtle and you can't hear any of the artifacting. And even after that, sometimes I'll still put on a little bit of the Ontario's auto tune just to smooth things out. but you can't, it's not perceivable unless you really have that deep knowledge.

Really what is perceivable now is when things are mildly out of tune and then you know it's not there. With the use of autotune and similar technologies, is there actually often primarily use as a labor-saving device because in the old days a lot of time is spent trying to get a good vocal take and, you know, you might get one that was perfectly in pitch, but it didn't have enough soul or personality or the phrasing wasn't right. And there are all kinds of complicated ways that people try to get around that producers. But now you can just put it all in pitch and put all your energy into getting the most characterful, you know, or rhythmically interesting performance. And then it just makes the whole recording process easier. It does seem like we live in an age now where Autotune, despite Jay-Z's claims about the death of Autotune, is not going anywhere.

And Simon, as you point out, this is really well. illustrated by Jay-Z's most recent release featuring with him and Beyonce released as the Carter's. Their hit single from that album, Ape S-word, is coded in Autotune through and through. So we are now living in an age of Autotune and I really appreciate Simon this article you've written because A, it gives us a sense of the history of where this technique came from. And I think it gives us a new frame for understanding it and accepting it. And the case, I think, of someone like me who tends to be somewhat of a Luddite when it comes to techniques like this. There's a way to locate artistry in Autotune. And in the future, I hope we can add this, Charlie,

to our arsenal of sort of analysis here. When we talk about groups like Migos, when we talk about future, you know, the way they interact with this technology is a fundamental. part of their craft and their art. So rather than deny it or complain about it, I think we have to enter into it fully. We are living in the age of autotune. Any final thoughts, gentlemen, before we close out here? Well, I think one of the key things was really when people started listening to their own voices when they were rapping or singing on autotune. And so, you know, with a rapper like Future or Quaver Amigos or Young Thug, they are. are hearing in real time what their voice sounds like. So they're pushing certain effects. They're

getting little wobbles and shivers and shudders and strange floaty ethereal effects very deliberately. And they sort of grown as artists through autotune. And, you know, in some of their cases, like Cuevo and Future, you will never hear them, not autotune. You know, it's always affected. There's no untampered with original performance. It comes out like that and they've learned how to sort of really push it as a technology. It makes me think a lot about how at this point, it's hard to, I think, assert sort of ideas of authenticity

to certain recording technologies and techniques because of their absolute ubiquity. Like, Nate, you've got here a MacBook Air, right? You have a music studio on this thing that would cost millions of dollars back in the 70s, and this isn't even the top of the line computer. So you can decide, do I want to use tape distortion? do I want to use auto-tune?

Do I want to use phasing techniques? And everything is kind of available, so it's a question of what are you choosing versus not choosing? And in many ways, the idea of recording to tape being authentic might come from a sense of the first thing that maybe punk bands recorded to was like onto an old tape machine because that's what was available. Now, if you want to record to tape, it's actually quite posh because you have to go to a studio that has maintained these old machines and are in working conditions. you have to fork a lot of money over, whereas people who are recording in their bedrooms today are recording on the computer that you have right in front of you. And in order to get some of those authentic sounds, now they're putting on plugins that sound like old tape machines,

but it's really just a question of what do you want to use, not so much of what you have access to because relative access is so low. And I think it makes us need to think about effects and the value that effects have entirely differently because access is ubiquitous. You've been listening to Switch on Pop. This episode was produced by me, Nate Sloan. And me Charlie Harding. You can find more episodes of our show at Switchedonpop.com. Radio Public, the Apple podcast app, Spotify, any podcast player you choose.

Our show is edited by the amazing Bill Lance, our community manager, Sarah Terry, and Luke Harris does all our design. I want to give a huge thanks to Simon Reynolds for joining us today. we'll throw up a link to his fantastic pitchfork article. And I'll also take this opportunity to direct you to his other brilliant work, especially the definitive book for me on the history of dance music, Energy Flash. Check out more of Simon's work at various publications and especially that book. Anything else, Charles?

We'll be back again with a new episode in two weeks. And until then, thanks for listening.