Music
The history of Auto-Tune in 7 songs
From Cher to Bon Iver, via T-Pain, Britney Spears, Black Eyed Peas and Kanye West, this is how Auto-Tune changed pop music in the 90s and 00s.
When Andy Hildebrand, a geophysicist who spent decades working in the oil industry, sat down to discuss the next chapter of his life at a dinner party, little did he know that things would turn out the way they have.
An ingenious mathematician, Hildebrand spent a large portion of his adult life interpreting seismic data for oil companies. Using a formula known as "autocorrelation," he sent sound waves to the bottom of the ocean floor, and recorded the reverberations from above the surface.
But after years spent searching for oil, Hildebrand was suddenly helping T-Pain, Cher and a Euro-pop group called Eiffel 65 score massive pop hits.
How exactly? Well, from autocorrelation came Auto-Tune, a plugin configured by software company Antares Audio Company, and patented by Hildebrand. The plugin, which Hildebrand tinkered around with for several months after a dinner party at which a friend joked about using a device to help her sing, had the ability to tune dud musical notes to the nearest acceptable pitch.
When Auto-Tune debuted at the 1997 North American Music Conference, it quickly became a silent phenomenon. And what should have been a fad continues to revolutionise music over 20 years later. This is the story of Auto-Tune in seven songs.
Cher – Believe
When Auto-Tune was launched, everyone wanted in, and of course they did. The plugin saved studio time and gave songs an impeccable sheen with minimal effort. The songs of 1997 sounded perfect, and better yet, the new plugin, which was lifting songs in new ways, basically went undetected. That is, until Cher came along.
When she heard a telephone vocal effect on TV that she liked, she wanted to recreate the sound for her 1998 dance album, Believe. Producer Mark Taylor had the plugin for that, but it was so radical that he worried about Cher’s reaction to it.
It’s so "sa-a-a-a-d that you’re leavin’", Cher sings through the quavering vocoder, in a way that not even Hildebrand, its inventor, could have foreseen. Auto-Tune had previously gone undetected, but on Believe it was exposed in all of its robotic glory. Taylor managed that by setting the plugin’s retune speed to zero, thereby staggering the natural transition between musical notes and making the singer sound as though she was breathing through a fan. It was a trick he didn’t want duplicated.
Eiffel 65 – Too Much Of Heaven
Auto-Tune came to revolutionise late-90s dance music just as the electric guitar changed rock 'n' roll several decades prior. And you could say that Eiffel 65 are to Auto-Tune what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar.
While Blue (Da Ba Dee) is undoubtedly the track you’ll remember them for, that song only flirted with the Auto-Tune sound that would go onto define the vast majority of Eiffel 65’s following output.
On their 2000 track, Too Much Of Heaven they pulled Auto-Tune out of its dance music box, and were the first musicians to use it while rapping. They deliberately sang in flat notes to exacerbate the effect, unwittingly tagging themselves onto the forefront of a new movement, as Auto-Tune found its way from dance music to hip-hop and R 'n' B.
T-Pain – I'm Sprung
In 2003, Auto-Tune found itself in the hands of a man named Faheem Rasheed Najm, better known now as T-Pain. While it had been used sparingly or discreetly before, T-Pain might have been the first artist to truly individualise Auto-Tune.
When T-Pain – host of Red Bull TV's Remix Lab – released his first single, I’m Sprung ,in 2005, it was like he owned the sound. In an interview from 2009, he told the Seattle Times that he’d first heard the effect on a song by Jennifer Lopez. It appealed to him first for its distinctness – no one was really using Auto-Tune after the millennium – and secondly, because he recognised that he wasn’t quite the best singer in the world.
I’m Sprung offered something new as well as something preternaturally emotional. For a brief period, the plugin finally became fashionable.
Kanye West – Love Lockdown
Kanye West gave Auto-Tune a status of prestige when he released his fourth album, 808s & Heartbreak, in 2008. Having spent much of his career sampling (mostly soul) music, he decided to incorporate himself more into the melody following the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and the untimely death of his mother. West wanted to use his own pain as an instrument, and Auto-Tune gave him the scope to do so.
He found the sound that would resonate his heartbreak when he took a trip to Hawaii to see T-Pain. They experimented with Auto-Tune together, and out of this came 808s & Heartbreak’s lead single Love Lockdown.
Juxtaposing a metallic voice with traditional taiko drums, West managed to make his pain sound uncanny, haunted, and desperately real, as he scaled through a phenomenal range of musical notes with the plugin’s aid.
Britney Spears – Womanizer
On Britney Spears’ 2009 album, her pain had mostly passed.
When Spears released her sixth album, Circus, the anti-Auto-Tune movement was in full flow. Swathes of Auto-Tune parodies filled up YouTube timelines and Saturday night talk shows, while Jay-Z released the single D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune).
Nevertheless, her Auto-Tune-doused hit Womanizer landed the singer her first UK Number One since her debut single in 1999. Spears sounds appropriately dehumanised, as she sings about the effects the pop industry has had on her and giving Auto-Tune a newly flattened emotional register.
Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow
Famous for cannibalising chart music trends, Black Eyed Peas followed in the wake of Spears’ Auto-Tune success with their futurist track, Boom Boom Pow.
The Auto-tune is on max, as the group promised that they were in the possession of “that future flow, that digital spit,” while relying on retro-futuristic clichés.
Nevertheless, the group managed to score their first UK Number One, proving that Auto-Tune still invited a broad appeal.
Bon Iver – Woods
It wasn't the first time that Auto-Tune and alternative music crossed paths – that honour most likely goes to Radiohead, who used the plugin sparingly throughout 2000’s Kid A – but Bon Iver’s use of the plugin has had a huge impact on popular music trends.
Bon Iver's debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, cabined his heartbreak with entirely acoustic, anguished elegies before it was rounded off by an unusual Auto-Tune track. “I’m up in the woods, I’m down on my mind,” he sings over and over with a slow Auto-Tune preset on final track, Woods.
It’s the sound of the altered reality that comes from extreme boredom, grief and hysteria. The effect is similar to the flat dehumanisation of Womanizer, but Bon Iver’s use of Auto-Tune has been much less contested.
His intermingling of raw, acoustic tracks with smatterings of Auto-Tune has gone on to inspire many other alt-pop musicians, including James Blake and How To Dress Well, and even Kanye West, who covered Woods on his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.