A brief history of Autotune

          By now, most people are familiar with the audio software application Autotune. Autotune is a pitch correction device used in vocal processing that was developed by Andy Hildebrand of Exxon, originally intended to manipulate sound waves for locating offshore oil reserves as well as for detecting earthquakes before they fully manifest. It was subsequently used by recording studios to correct vocal pitches on jingles, movies and other studio projects, and was a godsend for producers in session with artists whose material, persona and timbre of voice were enough to sell records, while their strict technical ability as vocalists was in some degree lacking. Techniques for achieving this same result previously existed in tape studios, but they were cumbersome and rarely used.

           The initial mission for Autotune was to keep the pitch adjustments as transparent as possible. Even when adjusting pitches in increments far less than a half-step, there are variations in formants and harmonic overtones that without compensation are noticeable to even an untrained ear and glaring to a professional or aficionado. Unsophisticated coding within software of this type can lend elevated pitches an “Alvin and the Chipmunks” kind of effect, and lowered pitches a mouthful-of-marbles kind of articulation. The true grace of Autotune’s coding was its sensitivity to the harmonic structure of pitches and the natural changes in formants that present themselves with pitch correction.

                The reasons for its immediate commercial success are obvious. Imagine an advertising executive booking a jingle singer and a producer for a TV commercial and neither of them are 100% that evening. The singer has already gone home with his check but a later playback reveals a pitch problem on one of the words. What used to be a disaster suddenly became easily manageable.

                Then came the inevitable experimentation and creative mangling of the initial purpose of the software by creative artists, as is the way with all new tools in music. Dance records in the late nineties used it on lead vocal tracks and it became a well-known club sound in England and the US. The first mass popularization of the unabashed use of Autotune on a lead vocal was Cher’s number one Billboard hit, Believe, in 1998.

                Listener or professional music-maker, everyone interested in sound all of a sudden asked themselves two questions: “What the hell was that?” and “Why am I listening to a Cher record?” Believe became Cher’s biggest hit ever, leaving Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, Half-Breed and other racially tone-deaf anthems in its unwavering pitch and sales wake. Whatever its artistic merit, Believe featured a lead vocal sound millions of Americans had never heard before and they loved it. After the Cher phenomena, Autotune use, with its signature audible click as it releases one pitch and jumps to another, was soon ubiquitous on the radio. Artists emerged whose every vocal take was processed using Autotune, notably T Pain, who scored the ultimate pitch-correcting triumph in his use of Autotune often being referred to as “The T Pain Effect.”

                Autotune is by no means the only pitch correction game in town. Melodyne aims itself pointedly toward the market that serviced the initial use of Autotune, to correct pitches with utter transparency rather than to use it to obvious effect on a lead vocal. Melodyne introduced a radical component to its software suite a few years ago called Direct Note Access or DNA, which lets you isolate individual pitches within a polyphonic performance and manipulate its attributes without affecting other notes in the chord. That is to say, if you are recording a barbershop quartet on a single microphone and you get a fantastic performance, save for Uncle Floyd’s one flat note in the last verse, DNA can isolate old Floyd’s baritone clam and bring it into pitch. It’s on the other three to pull him aside and tell him he’s keeping a secret from no one. Synthesizer giant Roland has developed an effective pitch correction software plug-in called V-Vocal that ships with its Cakewalk Sonar audio suite. It is easy to use and operates seamlessly within the parent software. Another big player is Waves, whose Tune correction software is in use in many major studios.

                After all of the hit songs with pitch-corrected vocals came the inevitable parodies and comedy applications, most notably the "Autotune the News" team who scored a major hit Autotuning Antoine Dodson’s notorious rant on Huntsville, Alabama television following an assault attempt on his sister. It’s amazing what passes for comedy, but that’s for another essay. Somehow though, Katie Couric reading national news in a pop/R&B vocal melody on top of what sounds like a Mariah Carey rhythm bed is pretty irresistible.

                Pitch correction as a blatant vocal effect is still popular in commercial music production but seems on the wane. Pitch correction as an editing tool, however, has cemented itself forever as an essential arrow in the music producer’s quiver. It opens worlds for artists, which is precisely what music technology tools are supposed to do.

A first visit to the Western Wall

Last week, my wife and I were in Jerusalem, me for my first time, and though somewhere between non-believer and scoffer, I sense and celebrate the power of places, history, and the meaning of human striving. In those categories and in the category that continues to elude me (for surely the loser in this lack of connection is not God), Jerusalem’s Western Wall is among the world’s most sacred places.

I remember images of the wall on television as a child growing up in a small Vermont town. For us, ethnicity was Irish or everything else and creed was either Catholic or not, and I remember thinking it odd, this dress, this sobbing, this utter sense of transportation they were experiencing (perfectly unperturbed as I recall with the cardinals' sea of little red hats). Mine was the kind of narrow outlook travel is unparalleled at befuddling.

Though not part of my religious education and family traditions, I intended to participate fully in my first visit to this venerated place, so I parted from my wife (the male and female areas of the Western Wall are separated) and entered the courtyard. Debra told me I needed to cover my head to approach the wall, and I assumed I would be spotted and provided a yarmulke. Invoking the absent-minded-professor component of my personality, I walked directly past a repository of gratis yarmulkes and waited.

Debra observed all of this and corralled a stranger to bring one of the yarmulkes down to where I was standing. Once fitted, I drew a deep breath and began my approach. There was an open space at the extreme right side of the wall, and I angled my direction toward it. Orthodox Jews in black Borsalinos and knee-length greatcoats, and Chassidics in shtreimels lined the wall, all whispering prayers and schuckling back and forth, flames seeking to loose the grip of the wick. 

With each step closer, the gravitas of where I was, the meaning and history of the place began to envelop me. The lash of the pharaoh, the wheels of Rome’s chariots, the swords of The Crusades, the pogroms of 19^th century Russia, Eichmann, Hitler, all of it, ALL OF IT, was right here, in the living rock. I noticed for the first time as I got closer thousands of pieces of paper, notes of prayer and devotion to a God that had only this past century begun once again to fulfill his promise and coalesce the global diaspora. This two-thousand year old explosion of imagination, talent, comedy, tragedy and humanity across the world and at the same time away from itself has made Moses’ forty-year wanderings a blink by comparison. And there they were, the dreams and griefs of that past year or that whole lifetime, summarized in scribbled sentences and stuffed into the wall. I lay my hands on the smooth limestone, and feeling a sudden deep, low vibration, I fell into a meditation over a tragic loss my family had undergone in the past year, over the scarring my father’s early death had caused since my boyhood, and of a personal woe I learned of just a few days before.

This juddering pulse arced into my hands and through my body, and found its ground through the bottoms of my feet and onto the stone plaza, dolomite and limestone slabs mined from ancient Israel’s begrudging bosom, foundation to this last remaining vestige against Rome’s conquest. I retreated as a pilgrim to the wall ought to, humbled, reverent and changed. So was God trying to make a deal after all? I still don’t think so. But it is a place that can be represented by no image, described by no words, and for me adds to a long list of reasons for wonder.

George H. W. Bush, some parting shots...

What’s that rustling sound? It’s the hedge I’m peeking over to see if sufficient time has passed to discuss the real George H.W. Bush: the rudderless operative, the corporate shill, the butcher. I learned something when I released my Reagan obituary the day after his passing and received 106 pieces of hate mail (death threats included), and that is is to let some time go by before issuing disparaging language about recently deceased beloved public figures.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (speak only well of the dead) invites omission. Which has been my strategy all week. It is a time to sit on your hands a while, and then collect and share your thoughts. It's poor form to boo the hearse, but public figures do merit and even require frank assessment, hopefully during their lifetimes, but also in times when their careers are in the public mind and that is, naturally, upon their passing. You can’t wait too long, as the hive mind’s appetite for mulling it over passes. It’s been a week. I hope that threads the needle adequately.

As a side note, on that blessed day when Trump at long last sucks down his last fast-food burrito and finally goes moobs-up with an esophageal hemorrhage, I can’t imaging not violating that conventional wisdom, and I expect I’ll join the rest of the munchkins in a few rousing choruses of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead,” probably while the body’s still warm (if it ever was).

Bush earns at least that amount of deference, a respectful passage of time to a father and a soldier, but given his role as chief facilitator for the most domestically destructive president in US history, Bush the elder earns revilement both for his own atrocities, and also for carrying Reagan’s water through Iran/Contra, the Garn-St. Germain Act, the War on Drugs, prison privatization and myriad other policies and positions that exacerbated US economic and cultural disparity, and encouraged what I have always felt to be the United Sates' two greatest enemies—racism and materialism. While we’re still saying nice things about him though, and this is not surprising as a former head of the CIA, Bush was a guy who could really keep a secret.

One common take on 41’s ethics and belief system this past week is that he “recognized political realities.” A more apt description would be to say he had no code apart from political expediency. On a topic as quintessentially divisive as abortion, Bush’s policy positions swung from a zealotry that puts a gun against a pregnant teenager’s head to family planning position that practically has him escorting her to the clinic. 

Bush was as in on the joke of trickle-down economics as anyone, himself having referred to it as “voodoo economics,” but that was before he became its leading mouthpiece. And even though he knew it was a naked transfer of wealth to the wealthy, he sold the Reagan policies with his WASPy chin and grin as the divide between the haves and have-nots in the United States became a chasm. Even when he succeeded Reagan and had the opportunity to adapt what he knew were more sound fiscal policies, he deferred instead to his new owners and a decidedly un-presidential path-of-least-resistance pledge to be a third term of Reagan.

Many have made a compelling case that the invasion of Panama was an illegal war of aggression under International Law, and that bombing slum villages and killing thousands of peasants in order to capture a pineapple-faced narco-trafficker for not having supported his predecessor's Nicaraguan death squads falls outside the scope of presidential authority. Seems reasonable. It is likewise commonly asserted that Desert Storm was prosecuted against the standards of the laws of war. While you could say that according to my own imagined doctrinal oversight, every American president should be thrown in leg irons and dragged before The Hague (and that may be true) the cases against Bush have a ripeness all their own, most especially in Iraq.

What with the now defunct Soviet Union’s Russian leadership momentarily in retreat, caprices in Iraq became too much for oil lobbies and GOP colonialists to resist. In a conscious effort to disabuse US citizens from “Vietnam Syndrome,” or a broad distaste for war (that in itself a depraved goal), and as a means of making some vague statement of purpose about reshaping the Middle East, Desert Shield was launched along with a string of specious rhetoric about Iraq dipping its straw at a diagonal into Kuwait’s oil fields. Iraq moved troops to the Kuwaiti border over Kuwaiti oil production quota violations and Bush had everything he needed. After rejecting every backpedal Hussein made from this tactical error, Desert Shield was set up as a farcical drumroll of feigned restraint to the planned cymbal crash of Desert Storm. It was the beginning of an involvement that was completed by George W. Bush in the most disastrous foreign policy petard in my lifetime—a two-decades-long slick of blood and oil that has as its bumbling progenitor the grinning, hapless and thoughtless policy architect, George Herbert Walker Bush, about whom he himself said, doesn’t “do the vision thing.”

False causes aside, the prosecution of that war, notably the “Highway of Death” was an exercise in wholesale slaughter that impressed even hardened soldiers. “Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, was quoted as saying. Does ten thousand fish shot in a barrel merit a war crimes tribunal? How about strafing enemy lifeboats after sinking a trawler? That’s a thing you’d have to ask a twenty-something George H. W. Bush.

Bush's hands on the intelligence spigot resulted in the October Surprise to end all October Surprises in 1980. In a move eerily reminiscent of Nixon sandbagging Johnson’s Vietnam talks in 1968, Reagan campaign operatives were sabotaging Carter’s talks with Iran to free the hostages. William Casey, Reagan’s campaign chairman, was in secret negotiations with Iranian officials promising a better deal with Reagan if the Ayatollah would hang on to the hostages through the election, and Bush kept his thumb on reports to that effect. He ran interference for Reagan during and after this illegal process that like the Nixon case, invokes the Logan Act. Bush had his own unseemly entry into the presidency with the notorious Willie Horton ad campaign.

Bush’s political career of towering ordinariness and political cowardice stands in sum as a weight on the ankle of justice as it makes it tireless slog up a hill the United States keeps trying to make steeper. There is a lot more to say and to regret about the brief Bush presidency, but I’ll leave you with the Hunter S. Thompson’s description of Bush the elder with his most perfectly selected spirit animal, the hyena, from “The Fix is In,” a brief paean to the run-up of his son’s stolen election: 

“There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. ... Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were liars and dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory….The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's.”

First, hats off to the master, Dr. Thompson, but what he and I both want you to take away from all of this is that the Bushes are in a club you’re not in, and they’d like to keep it that way.