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.