Autotune: death of creativity or the best thing to happen to hip hop?

#21

I wonder what your favourite examples of someone pushing the envelope/being innovative when it comes to autotune are? Whatever you think about AG Cook / PC music I think it’s fair to say that this v extreme use of autotune is pretty sick?

#22

It seems you might be writing an article about something that is actually only a minority concern. 99 problems and autotune ain’t one, if you will.

#23

exactly, a tool is just a mean, a knife is just a tool, you can use it in many differents ways to do many different things. So the use of it is not the central point.

#24

Maybe it’s not a binary, best/worst thing. I kind of feel it will end up being an indicator of the time, like gated snares in the 80’s. It will be a signature of an era and people and producers will eventually get sick of it. That being said, it’s still used in pretty traditional ways by most: adhering to traditional scales, etc. I’d like to see it used to a level where it feels accurately post-human. Like where maybe there wasn’t a vocalist at all.

#25

Agree with your point here about it being an indicator of an era, just think back to the whole synthesizer overuse in the '80s when they reached affordable prices.
Addressing the topic though, there’s a fine line to walk between “death of creativity” and simply a lowered boundary to making music… it’s similar to CGI in a way - you only notice it when it’s bad. I’m willing to bet a lot of artists use it for pitch correction with you being none the wiser.

#26

Exactly. As a subtle and standard tool, it’s used to a high degree for correction of bum note here and there. And you don’t hear it. Kind of like how subtle compression and other tools are used to make things sound better but you don’t hear the effect.

My take is that it should be used in a subtle manner or go full force on it. The worst is when it’s in some middle ground and you know the signer can’t sing and they’re trying to mask that fact. Lots of current indie music has this problem.

#27

yeah with Charli, it works perfectly. It reminds me of Britney Spears using it on Blackout, especially on a song like Piece of Me. I don’t see it as a crutch, but as just another layer. I also feel like when its used by artists like Charli and Alice Glass, there’s more of a neon pop aesthetic that comes with it, making their use of autotune then a stylistic choice which shapes their music, which is cool.

#28

actually wrote a master’s thesis on the use of autotune in rap and its aesthetic/semantic effects so i’m really interested in the subject and i do think that it’s an incredible tool that can add a fascinating new layer in a song’s structure

and when it comes to the “simplicity” that it brought to “singing” as it’s often heard, just looking at Lil Wayne’s or Future’s use of it is enough said; these two, and many others, really treat it as an instrument and it’s ridiculously far from using it to “sing well” (what is even singing well? aren’t chords, scales and so on relative in the end?)

#29

Agree to some artist’s use of autotune as an instrument, Future is a great example for sure!
Chords are “relative” to scales, but scales are not a “relative” thing at all. They rely on precise mathematic tone jump (the difference between each note in the scale). Of course different scales exist beside the occidental one but as far as i know they are quite precise.

#30

of course you’re right but i meant that they are relative in the sense that they define what’s a ‘right’ sound to most of the world (given the occidental cultural influence) as well as what’s a right jump between two notes hence the ‘weird’ sound of autotune, which explains a big chunk of the criticism towards the use of that plugin

#31

Well, being off-scale can be a great thing if you somehow master it. Like I said scales are not some institutions defining what sounds right on some sort of dated ideologies, they exist for a reason (they being the hughe number fo scales that exist thourghout music today) and are based on pure math afaik.
The weird sound of autotune comes from the fact that constantly altering the pitch of a sound as well as processing it in other various ways will of course sound weird, it’s not because of scales.
BTW I read somewhere that like 99% of recorded songs use autotune on the vocalist, sometimes even him or her knowing it. When it’s used for it’s original use-case (adjusting minor tone errors) it’s almost invisible (granted the singer can, in fact, sing).