Now for the thing sweeping the nation. It started decades ago, on very small scale things, like one note being out of tune. Now it is in every song produced and some songs solely rely on it as their musical talent. We've gone from singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong to robots. It can be quite that culture shock, I'm sure anyone from the 30's would be appalled at what we listen to but that's just a personal opinion. But nonetheless, it is pervasive and it is sound altering, so lets look into it.
Auto-tune is a computer program that can alter the pitch of the vocal or instrumental electrical recording. It will take what ever note it is given and take it to the nearest true semi-tone. For experience listeners, you can hear that an auto-tuned song sounds as if the singer or instrument is jumping from note to note rather than transitioning as is natural. This technology was originally meant to help with drilling for oil, but was discovered to have different abilities than just that. The first major commercial use of it was in Cher's Believe. Where she sounds cyberspacy. T-Pain is probably most famous for his use of Auto-Tune as that is all he does. I don't think I have heard an un-Auto-tuned song by him for half a decade. The song on the right is called Best Love Song and it is T-Pain featuring Chris Brown. I picked this because Chris Brown doesn't use (or only slightly uses) auto-tune where as T-Pain's voice is always auto-tuned. Listen to the runs that they do with their voices. You can tell T-Pain because his voice jumps from note to note with no continuity. It is just another example of musicians doing what it takes to stay ahead of the game, I guess.
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