While watching the recent Grammy Awards telecast, I was reminded of a fascinating technological breakthrough. No, not the iPad, though I’m sure the free product placement during Stephen Colbert’s monologue had Steve Jobs doing cartwheels. Rather, I’m referring to Auto-Tune.
If you’ve never heard of Auto-Tune, well, that’s just fine with the music industry. They’d prefer it that way. You see, without altering a vocal performance in any other discernable fashion, Auto-Tune (the creation of Antares Audio Technologies) manages to correct intonation problems, giving a singer perfect pitch. Tired voice? Feeling sick? Mediocre talent? No problem. Now those vocal flaws can be smoothed out in real time with no one being the wiser.
“It usually ends up just like plastic surgery,” a Grammy-winning recording engineer told Time. “You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it’s very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck. … Every singer now presumes that you’ll just run their voice through the box.”
Of course, we’re all aware that tinkering goes on when an artist lays down less-than-perfect vocal tracks for an upcoming CD. In such cases, the producer, label and singer operate with an understanding befitting the Las Vegas chamber of commerce: What happens in the recording studio stays in the recording studio. And fans tend to accept that, eager to own the most polished product possible. But what about live performances?
Last week at the Grammys, Black Eyed Peas, Jamie Foxx and Lil Wayne all reportedly relied on Auto-Tune onstage. Foxx even felt the need to apologize for it. Some use the device overtly, for the funky, machine-like quality it can lend to their voices. But for others, this controversial technology is becoming to the music biz what steroids and HGH are to major league baseball: a shortcut to excellence. So far there’s been no word on whether Jose Canseco will be naming names in an Auto-Tune tell-all book.
This practice isn’t without its casualties. These days, when someone sings live and is a little out of tune (like Taylor Swift crooning one of her hits during a Grammy duet with Stevie Nicks), people cringe even more than they might have years ago. Why? Because so much music is doctored these days that audiences’ expectations have changed.
We’ve become a perfectionist society, even if the perfection we crave isn’t quite real. Beautiful women are surgically enhanced, then Photoshopped before being allowed on a magazine cover. Athletes get their muscles from a lab to compete at a certain level or produce the gaudy statistics demanded of them. And now singers are taking a shortcut that, while not as egregious as Milli Vanilli-style lip-synching, compromises authenticity in the interest of impeccable quality. Where does it all end?
When I was talking about Auto-Tune with a colleague of mine, he suggested the device might be more akin to spell-checking than steroids. Many of us use a variety of artificial means—be it our morning caffeine fix to our smart phones—to improve our career performance.
I’m not convinced. I think using Auto-Tune is, quite simply, cheating. It occurs any time a modern innovation is covertly used to cut corners and enhance performance. So why should we be shocked when students confuse the downloading of a term paper from the Internet with “research”? I don’t support plagiarism. But is it really that much different? And at what point is it better for us, as a culture, to keep it real even if it’s not perfect?
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