The Auto-Tune Effect

This is also known as the T-Pain effect, that little digital modification that makes a human voice sound robotic. It is designed to correct inaccuracies in pitch, but artists like T-Pain seem to use it as an aesthetic of its own. In the same way that drum machines mimick drums but have an unmistakably different feel to them, so does the auto-tune voice change the way a singer sounds on a track.

Is using the auto-tune effect "cheating"? Country artists like Reba McEntire and Tim McGraw have admitted to using it during concerts, a way to ensure that the audience gets their money's worth by hearing the proper notes. T-Pain, and more recently Kanye West, make no secret of their use of the effect, so can we really think of their use in the same way? Is the auto-tune effect a new instrument altogether, used in different ways by different artists in the same way that a jazz enthusiast can tell Louis Armstong's trumpet playing from that of Dizzie Gillespie?

And the way that it "corrects" pitch...could we see that as a democratizing force in music? If all stray notes are pushed into perfect pitch, doesn't it stand to follow that anyone can sing a song with auto-tune and have it sound polished, maybe even "professional"? Might this allow a wider swath of singers onto the airwaves? Or does the effect actually serve to gloss away any natural characterstics of voice and instead create a one-size-fits-all model of "singer"?

Auto-Tune Democracy...an elective course, coming soon to a liberal arts college near you...