Why autotune destroys music

By Jacob H

Does Auto Tune destroy the natural creativity of modern music?

Auto tune has destroyed and changed music and the music industry. These days, people rely way too much on auto tune to perfect their vocals in unnatural ways. This is a terrible thing because natural voices have so much variation, and without this we all just sound like boring robots.

For those of you who don’t already know, auto tune is a tool that can be used for an effect but is also used for keeping you in tune while singing. Auto Tune can be described as an audio manipulation tool. People shouldn’t be using auto tune, people should just be practicing and getting better.

Even if the singer is good or even amazing, the producers still want to auto tune. For example, Freddie Mercury is one of the greatest singers of all time and even his voice has auto tune on it in his latest song. Chris Liepe, a Youtuber, proved this by isolating the vocals, putting the vocals into the auto tune application, and showing how unnaturally in-tune Freddie’s singing is. Chris Liepe also compared the new song that has auto tune (“Face it Alone”) and Queen’s classic song “Love of my Life” from their album in 1975 “A Night at the Opera”. There was of course no auto-tune on the song from the 70’s as the effect was not even invented. On this track you can hear the natural and beautiful variations in Freddie’s voice. Chris also showed what autotune sounds like using the song “Love of my Life” with and without autotune. You know this because of the natural vibrato in Freddie’s voice without auto tune being compared with auto tune having Freddie’s vocals being unnatural. Clearly, human beings and their natural abilities are superior to anything that technology can offer.

“It's not about being perfect, it's not about sounding absolutely correct, it's not about what goes on in a computer. It's about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head]," Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters front man and Nirvana drummer, said in an interview on his opinion about auto-tune.

Dave Grohl also said in an interview, “People should recognize what it is to be a human playing music. You can use all this technology to make a performance sound correct or ‘perfect.’ I think that really robs music of its true personality.” To me, this means that music is about connecting with other human beings to make something special together. The more naturally we do this, the better because humans have more of an ability to go with the flow and create something that has feeling behind it. Emotion!

Funnily enough, Grohl one time found out that a producer put auto tune on his voice and said “take that off my f*cking voice, I wanna sound like me!”

Auto tune may give an average singer a career/ opportunity in the entertainment industry without necessarily having well developed vocal skills. The main idea of this it for the singer to sound perfect and in tune.

This is also shown in modern music. Auto-tune has also been successfully used by the artist named Cher in her song “Believe” and many known artists such as Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, and Travis Scott’s song “Antidote”.

Autotune technology has many supporters but the people who believe that it strikes at the heart of integrity and creativity in music creation has a point. The Autotune technique could be seen as an easy way out for those artists that don’t necessarily have a well-developed vocal range.

This shows people aren’t as creative in the music industry as they once were. In modern music, if it’s not auto-tune artists are relying on to sound good, it’s something else. There are so many things’ producers do in post-production to hide the mistakes of musicians. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, even the 90’s too, most things were recorded to tape, meaning the musicians had to play their tracks really well because the editing the tape was extremely difficult! These days, you can just take the easy way out, and that’s happening far too often!

Ultimately, things aren’t the same and natural enough because people rely on technology and auto-tune all too often. In other words, people sound too perfect and unnatural. Although auto tune is not suitable for rock music (in my opinion), it may be a handy tool for other music genres such as Rap or R&B, but we need to be careful of relying on technology to make ourselves ‘perfect’.

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