Regardless of its artistic merits, the occasional unsubtle use of Auto-Tune has made its mark on pop culture. Just last month, an outfit called Gregory Brothers used Auto-Tune to create a song from a local news clip.
The clip featured a rant by a young man whose sister was the victim of an attempted rape in a housing project in Huntsville, Ala. The viral video and ditty posted to YouTube, called "Bed Intruder Song," has become a Billboard hit courtesy of its trilling, Auto-Tuned-to-absurdity lines such as "He's climbing in your window, he's snatching your people up.
You better hide your kids, hide your wife. Live Science. All you have to do is record your voice onto a tape recorder and play it at a faster speed. The problem is, the trick leaves your voice with a high-pitched "chipmunk" sound.
The genius of Auto-Tune is that it can alter the pitch of your voice while still preserving its original quality of the overall recording. Using immense quantities of math, Auto-Tune is able to map out an image of your voice. Using that data, it can then tweak the pitch of your voice without doing too much damage to your voice's original tone and feeling. The new program saved time and money, and, according to Hildebrand, it made for better music.
Here's what Hildebrand told the Seattle Times in Now they just do the emotional performance, they don't worry about the pitch, the singer goes home, and they fix it in the mix" [source: Matson ].
Within years, 95 percent of all Top 40 songs counted traces Auto-Tune in their production [source: Freeman ]. Still, purists derided the software as "cheating"; artists just weren't taking the time to record quality vocal tracks anymore.
American singer-songwriter Neko Case summed it up in a interview: "When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody's voice, I don't take them seriously" [source: Dombal ]. Worse, Auto-Tune was also accused of filling pop music with attractive yet untalented singers. Only a few years before Cher's "Believe," the pop duo Milli-Vanilli had been charged with fraud after audiences discovered that the band's two members had actually been lip-syncing vocals performed by different musicians.
Fearing a similar scandal, engineers took pains to disguise their vocal-correction footprints as much as possible. Meanwhile, buried deep in the software was a setting known as the "zero function.
Just like a real human voice, the software will take a few milliseconds to gently ease from one note to the next. But Auto-Tune came with the option to reducing the space between notes to zero, thereby forcing the notes to change instantaneously from one to the other, giving the vocal track an eerie, computerized timbre. It was like using Photoshop to dial up a picture to percent brightness. Sure, you could do it, but it would turn your image into a washed-out mess. Similarly, engaging the zero function would transform your vocal track into a clutter of warbly, sci-fi sounds.
Surely, the engineers thought at Antares, nobody would ever need to use the zero function. In Renaissance Italy, every self-respecting opera house had hosted at least one castrato -- male singers that had been castrated at an early age to preserve their ability to sing at a high pitch.
Each year, hundreds of parents sent their boys to back-alley doctors, just to give them a chance at one day making it big on the European concert hall circuit. That is, until Italy outlawed the practice in Long before Auto-Tune, it seems, musicians have gone to great lengths to modify their singing voices.
More recently, artists have been using all kinds of electronic tricks to twist, distort and modify their vocal tracks. Pete Frampton wowed audiences with the talk box , a modified vocoder that allows artists to "speak" through their instrument using a plastic tube.
In the Beatles' hit, "Strawberry Fields Forever," John Lennon slowed down his vocal track, giving his voice a deeper, slurred sound. In the hit, "Mr. Roboto," Styx used a vocoder to simulate the sound of a robot talking. The music studio has always been a place to experiment, and with Auto-Tune within easy reach for every major music producer in the United States, it was only a matter of time before someone took the software "to the limit.
Reportedly, during the "Believe" sessions, engineers had tweaked Cher's voice with the zero function purely as a joke [source: McNamee ]. Controls the frequency of all chips, and, separately, weak chips. If the chips are not tuned, then the problematic chips will have a hashrate decrease, while they will consume as much as other chips. It also helps to overclock ASICs. Autotune always starts with a high voltage, and gradually reduces it. It works from stable condition to the unstable one.
And if you run them on high voltage and gradually lower them, then the chips work stably. Here is an example of how it works: we have a lot of chips on the board. By default, all chips operate at MHz. For example, 8. Therefore, we have a certain consumption in watts, depending on the voltage and frequency.
Each chip should, for example, issue 70 gigahash. But, on the board there are 10 half-dead chips. They can't work at MHz, and instead of 70 gigahash they give out 5 gigahash.
But they also accept 8. The chip consumes as much as those ones which work properly, but produces little. Autotune "sees" this, and begins to gradually reduce the frequency on the chip until the chip can give a hashrate in accordance with its frequency. But as we all know, it gets exploited to make any good looking singer sound like they were born to sing. How exactly does it work?
It works when the user sets a specific reference point, such as a scale or certain notes, and also a rate in which deviations from the set point will be corrected. This rate can be calibrated so that the artist can sound natural. But it can also be altered quickly by the artist, creating a digitized sounding voice, the exact type of sound that is popular in music today.
So why is auto tune best suited for bad singers? For the answer we have to turn to one of the creators of South Park , Trey Parker for the answer.
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