Auto tune

You should have posted this in the Arts & Culture subforum.

Autotune was a cute gimmick when it came out, but it's far outlasted its charm, if you ask me.

Every decade or two we suffer through a trend of dumbing-down music. The early bonehead rock'n'roll tunes, punk, rap, now this. It always appeals to somebody. After suffering through Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Welk, I thought the early bonehead rock'n'roll tunes were fabulous. Lots of people loved punk and rap. I'm sure there's somebody out there who loves autotune.

This too shall pass. Be patient. You pull out your old Michael Jackson records and I'll listen to Roxy Music.

 

Autotune is an electronic vocal pitch stabilizer. If you sing a note that isn't quite on the pitch of any of the notes on the chromatic scale, it normalizes it to the nearest one.

For example, B flat above middle C vibrates the air molecules at a frequency of 466Hz. The next lower note in the chromatic scale, A, has a frequency of 440Hz. If you sing a note with a frequency of 450Hz, which is off the scale, Autotune will "normalize" it to 440Hz and turn it into a "correct" A.

Pop singers generally slide one note into another if they're very close on the scale. So when they sing this way into an Autotune device, the note changes abruptly from one to the next, with no interruption of breath. This makes it sound unnatural, because no one can actually sing that way. (Well, opera singers come very close. Pat Benatar was opera trained and her delivery is noticeably different from the average rock'n'roller. Compare her cover of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" to the original.)

But there's another problem with Autotune. The essence of rock and roll, one of its fundamental characteristics, is a blues modality. This is a major scale with the third and seventh notes sometimes natural and sometimes flat: this is what gives the blues its tension. In fact in singing the note often slides between sharp and flat, producing even stronger tension depending on how long it takes to slide and how much time it spends at either end of the slide. In fact IMHO one of the reasons the guitar became the signature instrument of rock and roll rather than the piano (no disrespect to Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, who were fabulous rockers) is the ability to bend the strings, creating the same sliding effect and more tension.

Autotune "corrects" the slide. The first half of the note will be on the higher pitch and the second half will be on the lower pitch, destroying the tension in the scale. Singers who use Autotune understand this and don't even try to slide their notes. This removes the blues modality and the tension it creates from this sub-genre of rock and roll.

Of course rock music has a long and celebrated history of oversimplification. The earliest rockabilly tunes were old-fashioned twelve-bar blues with a bonehead Country Shuffle beat. Doo-wop was the same four-chord progression all the way through the song and into the next one. Many of the early hits used only the notes in the pentatonic scale. Abba pioneered the abandonment of the blues modality long before Autotune was invented. Rap, from a technical definition, is not even music since it has rhythm but no melody. Punk, from the Sex Pistols to Green Day, most of those guys couldn't play their instruments as well as the average high school garage band--in 1959!

So now we have Autotune, the latest wave of "dumbing down" rock music. I wouldn't be surprised to see the technology evolve so you can do more with it than simply normalizing a note. Perhaps adding vibrato to it (quick oscillation in pitch, what the mis-named "tremolo arm" on a guitar does--tremolo is an oscillation in volume, not pitch). Maybe it will split a note into two harmonic notes so you can sing backup for yourself without overdubbing. Maybe it will automatically translate your song into Spanish for the growing rock en español market.

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Autotune is not really a fabulous new development. Karaoke rigs do it for the entire song. If you can't quite sing "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" in F minor, it will raise every note on every instrument by one step (for example) and play the accompaniment for you in G minor.

 

There were a number of bands that got MTV going, including Madonna and Duran Duran, but Michael Jackson certainly made some of the most elaborate videos. "Thriller" was a complete story, and both "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" were exceptional productions.

One of the greatest things about MTV in the beginning was that they'd play just about any song that had a video. Heavy metal, disco, new wave, ballads, synth-pop, they'd play them all back to back. Radio was really getting fragmented in those days so it was nice to be able to hear a variety of music without having to keep switching stations.

Back in the early 70s you could leave your radio on one station all day and you'd hear the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, the Eagles, the Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Yes, Merle Haggard, the Who, Sam & Dave, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Linda Ronstadt, Genesis, Earth Wind & Fire, Roxy Music, Black Sabbath, Kris Kristofferson, the Allman Brothers and Fairport Convention. Now stations play ONLY metal or ONLY hip-hop or ONLY dance music or ONLY soft rock or ONLY R&B.

Michael Jackson WAS a little boy. The way he was raised, he never had a chance to grow up. All artists have their dark side.

 

I don't equate them. Lawrence Welk's band played the conservative popular music style from our parents' era, the 1920s and early 30s. Even though on his TV show they played some contemporary songs, they were always the least outrageous ones, set in very old-fashioned arrangements that made our parents happy.

Frank Sinatra sang swing, an upbeat form of jazz from the late 1930s that was still popular among older people in the 1950s and even occasionally appealed to the younger folks and made it onto the Top 40. Rock and roll hadn't quite taken over pop music yet, and upbeat songs in other styles like swing, cool jazz, show tunes and even the occasional polka were mixed in with the radio sets. I remember at least one hit by Sinatra in the mid-1960s, "Strangers in the Night"--which, notably, was not swing.

Many of the other great singers of earlier times tried, with various degrees of success, to adapt to the post-swing era. Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Kaye Starr, Andy Williams and Teresa Brewer had a few hits and Julie London (one of my favorites) even covered the Doors' "Light My Fire."

After all, swing, particularly Western Swing, was one of the motifs that were mixed together to form rockabilly, the first hits that were recognized as being the new style of music that Alan Freed christened "rock and roll."

But Sinatra and Welk both represented "old-fashioned music." As the feisty and enormous Baby Boomer generation came to seize control of American culture (hula hoops, motorcycles, drugs, civil rights, pacifism, the decline of religion, the sexual revolution) rock and roll virtually squeezed out the older styles of pop music. Even folk music became marginalized, and country music sounded like rock and roll with steel guitars.