Autotune The New Way To Hear

0 CommentsTuesday • November 30, 2010 • by Imei

A follower on my Twitter feed the other day asked me to check out a livestream show with a person using an autotuning program to alter his voice while singing. I watched it, and found myself laughing. What is it about autotuning that is intriguing? I think autotuning is interesting because it gives us a new way to hear what is familiar. It is this aspect that makes music enjoyable to the point that we listen to the same songs and pay money to hear them in concert when we already know the tune: we like hearing it again.

Can you learn from T-pain?

Here’s a sound of which most of us are familiar.Take a listen to what a baby sounds like on autotune:

Baby T-pain autotuned. Sounds better than Justin Bieber. Or Brittany Spears.

What do you think? Are there elements of creativity that intersect with the idea of autotuning, rendering that which is familiar into something just a little different to become novel to our ears or eyes? What parts of your art, your work, your style of relating, or your powers of observation, could be affected if you applied an aspect of autotuning to it? What do you think might potentially be lost?

For an interesting read on what music is, and why we love it, check out, “This is Your Brain On Music” by Daniel J. Levitin. Music lovers and novices alike will enjoy Levitin’s entertaining yet well-researched writing on what our brains are doing when we listen and create music.