Hildebrand, an amateur flutist who got his undergraduate education on a music scholarship and later earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, goes by the nickname Andy and likes to be called “Dr. Andy,” in the manner of a self-help author or a pediatric dentist. In interviews he gives Auto-Tune a sagely public face, talking with non-critical affection for both music and technology, shrugging off ethical questions with folksy humor. “Well, I don’t know if it’s bad or good,” Hildebrand said in an interview with The Seattle Times. “I’m not a judge of that. It’s very popular, so in that sense it’s good. I don’t place value judgments on things like that.... Someone asked me at one point in time if I thought that Auto-Tune was evil. I said, ‘Well, my wife wears make-up. Is that evil?’ And yeah, in some circles that is evil. But in most circles, it’s not.”
To the extent that use is a measure of popularity, Hildebrand is correct about Auto-Tune. (Attitudes are a different kind of measure, of course, since users of things can have mixed feelings about the things they use.) Auto-Tune is a fixture in popular music today, employed far more widely than most people realize. There are no hard statistics to quantify the use of digital pitch correction; Antares declines to release its sales figures, and so does its main competitor, the German company Celemony, which calls its software Melodyne. In recording studios, pitch correction tends to be employed discreetly, if not surreptitiously, to preserve the reputation of singers. Each day, meanwhile, less and less pop recording takes place in the foam-padded studios of the old-paradigm record industry, and more and more is done in private, at home, with laptop software. Pitch-correction plug-ins are all but standard accessories for home recording, as the old lines between professionalism and amateurism, vocation and avocation, dissolve. The physics are simple: the lower the singers’ levels of skill, experience, or talent, the higher the value of Auto-Tune. The fact that one can or cannot sing no longer has much bearing on whether one will or will not sing. (...)
What does it mean to say that someone “can sing”?
My wife, the cabaret singer Karen Oberlin, is a third-generation musician. Her parents met at Tanglewood when they were playing in a youth orchestra under Leonard Bernstein. Her paternal grandparents were vaudeville performers who sang and played light classics and comedy songs on the Chautauqua circuit. Karen and I have a nine year-old son, and since he was in pre-school, his teachers have been telling us that the kid has musical talent. But what are they saying, exactly?
As I just suggested by relaying that family history, it is natural to think of musical ability as naturally ingrained, a gift—something endowed, if not by genetic inheritance, then by God. There is evidence of the inheritability of artistic talent in gene research, and there is a case for the divine in every concert review that describes a piece of music as transcendent or miraculous. Not that no one believes that creative skills (in music or any of the arts) cannot be learned, to some degree, or developed through training and experience. Without such a faith, where would the MFA industry be? Still, the Nietzschean conception of talent as a natural endowment—and more than that, a supernatural one—persists, only bolstered and gussied up now in DNA lingo.
This line of thinking underlies the widespread contempt for Auto-Tune as an extra-natural method of accomplishing what should supposedly come naturally, and it helps preserve our enduringly romantic conception of artists as special creatures, anointed or made differently than the rest of us. We resent Auto-Tune not so much because it is non-human—we put our faith (and, increasingly, our affection) in electronic devices every day—but more because the power it applies, in providing a way to sing in perfect intonation, seems superhuman and, in practice, indiscriminate. Auto-Tune defies the myth of the creative gift.
by David Hajdu, TNR | Read more:
