I first must clear up a common misconception I stumbled upon myself. There is a difference in the vocoder and Auto-Tune. The vocoder was first used in music in 1969, and was used heavily by artists like Roger Troutman (Zapp & Roger), George Clinton, and Teddy Riley. The Auto-Tune software, developed by Antares Audio Technologies, wasn’t released until 1997. And received prominence in 1998 with Cher’s “Believe”. Since that time, many artists including Faith Hill and Tim McGraw have confessed to using the pitch correction software in their performances.
Hip Hop artist T-Pain, who has inspired many other artists to use the technology in their songs, brought the software to light more recently in 2000. These artists include, but are not limited to: Jamie Foxx, Snoop Dogg, Avril Lavigne, Natasha Bedingfield, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Sean Kingston.
But of course, many of you know this. The point of this post is to show you how far Auto-Tune has gone. Let’s take a regular news story, like this one…
And now let’s make a song of it. Like so…
The credit goes to “schmoyoho” and his YouTube channel “Auto-Tune the News”. This song is actually one of the most popular in recent months. There is an iTunes version and a T-shirt out. Antoine Dodson has given interviews on the fame of this song, which has close to 25 million views on YouTube. I actually think the video is pretty funny. In order to really appreciate the song, I think you must be exposed to the original video.
Has Auto-Tune oversaturated our lives? You be the judge.
My sources include my own knowledge, and Wikipedia.
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