Pop will auto-eat

Auto-tuning in modern pop vocals

A great deal has been written on self-referential lyrics in modern music.  The way that fame and wealth are no longer merely one of the trappings of being a popular musician, but have become a distinct musical genre;  that the meta-narrative of the fact that the artist is singing / rapping has become the main subject of many of their songs.  Over the last few years, a similar trend has accompanied ‘auto-tuning’.

The means becomes the end

Auto-tuning is a piece of sound-effect software, invented to correct the pitch of errant notes in a sung melody.  For decades, it has been used a humble mechanism to assist in a song’s production, and is usually unobtrusive; only a highly trained ear would generally detect its presence.  

However, in recent years, auto-tuning has made the transition from being a tool – a peripheral meta-component of a song – to a style in its own right;  a signature part of the musical content, bordering on becoming a new instrument, or even its own genre.  This move to the centre-stage was achieved by using it not to softly adjust the pitch of a single note, but to harshly glitch between notes, creating a distinctive sound that quantises fluctuations in pitch into a robotised glissando.

The first singer to use auto-tuning as the focus of the song itself, was Cher, in ‘Believe’ (“Do you belie-^ee-ieve in life after love?”) in 1998. Since then, the use of ostentatious auto-tuning in pop songs has become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to cite key examples.  However, R’n’B star T-Pain has become particularly strongly associated with the sound – so much so, that an auto-tuning iPhone app is named after him.

Reification of art

With the increasing commodification of music, songs have increasingly been ‘presented’, just as television gameshows are presented, as opposed to being played.  It has become a cliché that singers are increasingly hooks on which to hang the sale of a commercial product, and that as a result, pop stars’ musical accomplishment takes a back seat to how photogenic they are.  The rise of auto-tuning then makes perfect sense, as a proportionate response to the rise of mediocrity.  

Bur what is interesting here is not auto-tuning’s increased deployment, but the way that it has become its own subject.  By brazenly parading the destruction of artistic merit, and simultaneously nullifying the merit attributed to art in the first place, the logic of auto-tuning comes full circle – eats itself (auto-eats) – the reification of art becomes both the mode of production and subject-matter of its usurper.  

Meanwhile, the way that auto-tuning removes the human character from a voice, wiping it clean of personality and expression, also fits well with the musical commodity as a replacement for creative human endeavour.  Where Walter Benjamin once spoke of the replicability of an artwork becoming more important than its artistic function, this has now been taken one step further – not only are songs reproducible (through CDs, MP3s, etc): so, in effect, are the singers, as they become interchangeable through the loss of their individual character. 

Reify everything

Auto-tuning has become refracted through the lens of internet pop-culture to produce the phenomenon of ‘auto-tuning everything’.  With the notable exception of the genre’s most celebrated exponents, ‘Auto-tune the News’ (who use the technique as a comedic device to produce topical parody songs, in the same way that Rory Bremner uses impersonation), auto-tuning everything tends to have the effect of reifying its subject-matter.  

 

For example, there is a Youtube video of a Barack Obama speech on healthcare, which has been auto-tuned by T-Pain.  This is utterly deleterious to any engagement with the content of Obama’s speech, stripping it of political intent and transforming into a purely sonic spectacle.  Likewise, a baby crying is no longer a visceral plea for affection, but a sound.  

In the visual arena, Vice magazine performed a similar trick in December 2010.  When they used the student demonstrations as a backdrop for a fashion shoot, they did something more destructive than expressing a view for or against the education cuts, or even subsuming some counter-cultural niche market within the capitalist mode of production:  they turned the demonstration, and its political meaning, into an image.  Not an image of something – just an image; an object in its own right, in isolation, untethered from any social critique or human experience.

This piece is not a criticism of auto-tuned music itself.  (Some of my best friends are auto-tuners.)  Even if it is argued that the unique personal qualities of the human voice distinguish it from other musical instruments, the auto-tuning question is not fundamentally different to the long history of the mechanisation of musical production.  Very few would criticise a musician for using electronic drums, or for using computer software for mastering tracks. 

The difference is that electronic beats are used because they sound interesting, not because of a surplus of beautiful but unskilled drummers.  So, even if we don't criticise auto-tuned music in its own right, it's still worth considering the self-referential, self-consuming and self-destructive tendencies, which lie in the origins of this genre's inception. 

Government climate modelling - framing the future

Last week, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) released an interactive tool for the public to model the UK’s future greenhouse emissions.

It’s similar to a game I remember being in the Science Museum when I was about 8, in which you had to launch a rocket by choosing the correct fuel load, speed and flight path – the different parameters interacted in such a way that only one combination created the right balance;  if you got them in the wrong proportions, it would cause the rocket to crash. 

Likewise, the DECC tool models the UK's contribution to anthropogenic climate change - but instead of choosing flight path and velocity, the player is asked to balance their choices of fuel (solar, coal, etc), and other technologies (eg loft insulation).  These factors are applied to the whole country, and the model estimates the resulting energy consumption and greenhouse emissions between now and 2050. 

The underlying assumption is that if we choose the right technology, we can solve the problems of pesky climate change.  But is it really that simple?

The striking thing about the DECC model is that it excludes all but the most physical aspects of climate change.  There’s no mention of political issues; nor social, economic, or historical ones.  Even the section on ‘Energy security’ is measured in giga-Watt-hours.

But this isn’t just a simplification, in the way that busking the guitar chords to approximate a Django Reinhardt tune is a simplification. 

By framing the situation as a simple selection of technofixes, it changes they very question that is being asked in the first place.  For example, we’re not – unsurprisingly – presented with a website that models the possible environmental effects of a radical redistribution of wealth. 

The DECC model is thus yet another expression of that old government favourite:  that “There Is No Alternative” ('TINA', a phrase coined by Margaret Thatcher).  The logic is that those in power get to choose the rules of the conversation, and no one else gets a look in.  There's no room for discussion - the options have been decided.  

This rhetoric has been deployed forcefully in the debate on public service cuts.  We’re constantly told that we must accept the destruction of the welfare state, because there's no money.  The idea that the cuts are ideological – that we could stop paying for wars, or tax the rich – is swept aside.  The memory of the difficult post-war economic situation Britain found itself in when the welfare state was actually established is conveniently forgotten. 

However, the DECC tool takes the old TINA rhetoric one step further.  Historically, the terms of debates in the public sphere have always been influenced to some extent by groups seeking to question those in power.  Even though political discourse is heavily determined by powerful institutions with vested interests, they don't (quite) yet get to choose what demonstrations happen and what their demands are;  television interviewers, however much they perform within the limitations of the corporate media organisations they represent, still pose questions on political and social issues of public interest.

The ability of the government to use tick-box forms in online computer simulators is relatively new, and marks a subtle departure from the old type of debate.  It offers enhanced powers to frame debates in rigidly defined and highly technocratic terms, resplendent with technicolour graphs to support their spuriously quantitative analyses.  A new peak in the technological bureaucratisation of late capitalist life has emerged.

This hyper-mechanised approach to policy formation allows, to a greater extent than ever before, our leaders to determine not only the outcome of the debate, not just the form and content of the discussion, but the parameters of the questions themselves.

However, far from being an entirely novel phenomenon, it rather invokes the image of some mediaeval high-priest, counselling kings on battle by consulting crystal ball and eye of newt.  Notwithstanding the differences in the scientific rigour of their respective claims, the appeal to an opaque and elite authority of knowledge is familiar.  The only difference is the New Labour-inspired cloak of apparent inclusivity, which the modern programme cynically shrouds itself in. 

All that remains now, is for the government to implement the new online referendum for the Survey Monkey generation. 

"Tick A if you want to keep hospitals;  Tick B if want schools.  YOU decide!"