A song must sound the best. A singer must have the ability to sing at a high pitch, and must preserve this ability. At an early age, male singers were castrated by back-alley doctors in Italy to achieve this effect. This practice was later outlawed in 1870.
Thus one can appreciate that singer had gone to great lengths before electronic tricks were available to twist, distort and modify their voices.
There were talk boxes or vocoders where artists used to speak through a plastic tube. Opera singers use Vibrato which delivers a note in wavering pitch. Auto -Tune is a computerized twist on this technique.
In 1997, a software called Auto-Tune was released. It is called pitch correcting software. It was developed by Harold Andy Hilderbrand. Since electric guitar invented by Les Paul, Auto-Tune heralded the biggest technological advance that affected popular music.
Its developer Hilderbrand was an electrical engineer who worked in oil industry. He retired at the age of 40. Thereafter, he founded Antares Audio Technologies, a music software company in California. His wife expected him to develop something that kept her in tune.
Previously, music recordings were never flawless in the first attempt, and there were re-recordings — multiple vocal tracks.
Auto-Tune made multiple recordings unnecessary. It required a few clicks of a mouse. It calls up the full performance on the computers screen. The wrong notes are nudged into the right key.
Auto-Tune alters the pitch, keeping the original intact. It uses math to do so. It makes image of the voice, and makes music better.
It can turn a lousy singer into a virtuoso. It is a great help to even untalented singers.
Auto-Tune puts small spaces of time between notes , and it takes a few milliseconds to ease from one note to another. Auto-Tune can reduce the space between notes to zero where the notes change instantaneously. It gives the notes an eerie, computerized timbre.
Auto-Tune is recording industry’s dirty secret.
One year after the release of Auto-Tune, on October 19, 1998, Cher’s Believe was released on radio. Its theme is the bounce back after a break up. It climbed the music charts. Later Cher’s Believe was subjected to Auto-Tune’s zero effect. They called it Cher effect. When Cher is 35 seconds into the song, she sings the line ‘I can’t break through’. Here there is electronic modification of vocals.
Amateur musicians used Auto-Tune. Advertisers too threw their hats in the ring. They started using Auto-Tune in commercial jingles.
Even if Cher effect disappears from the music world, Auto-Tune will stay as long as the singers continue to make mistakes.