perceived shortcomings of cover-corrective tuning methods, other social groups began to explore the ways in which auto-tuning could be used to produce creative new sounds. Like Russolo, who sought to seize machine noise as a mode of emotional production rather than mask it in a project of emotional fidelity, artists outside of the fields of audio and software engineering went about amplifying the artificiality of tuning algorithms in the pursuit of a new sounds. This chapter looks at how pitch correction software was repurposed as an overt effect. In the hands of pop stars, songwriters, and critically creative audiences of popular music, the sounds of overdriven tuning plugins were woven into afro-futurist and feminist musical traditions. As covert tuning inscribed itself in the standard practices, included features, and public conversation around auto- tune, engineers and recording artists sought new ways of making voices together.
Overt Tuning as a Critical Practice
Scholars in the fields of cultural studies and critical theory took an early interest in how auto-tune was deployed as a conspicuous effect in pop music production, especially by black and female artists. Kay Dickinson drew on the idiom of Cyborg Anthropology (Downey et al. 1995) in her reading of Cher’s pioneering use of the effect in her 1998 hit “Believe,” suggesting that it provided a way of thinking about “who and what is reproduced (And by what sorts of
technologies) when a ‘human subject’ is recognized.”(Ibid) Dickinson highlights the “camp” aspect of Cher’s repurposing of vocal processing, arguing that “[b]y pushing current (largely straight male) standards of pop, perfection, fakery and behind-the-scenes mechanisation in unusual directions, a vocoder, like other camp objects, might complicate staid notions of reality,
the body, femininity and female capability.” (Dickinson 2001, 345) She also recovers the fact – easily forgotten in a post-T-Pain era, that for several years the so-called “Cher effect” was primarily employed by female artists, noting that “no long- standing male artists of the stature of Madonna (no Bryan Adamses or George Michaels) have used the device, nor even have the more 'feminised' male performers such as the contemporary boy bands” (Dickinson 2001, 341)
Cher had long been considered an icon of empowerment for the LGBTQ community, for which camp’s project of “delight in the inauthentic” had proven, as Dickinson puts it,
“inspirational in its survivalist hints.” Upon the release of her album Believe and its titular single, Cher had recently been awarded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s (GLAAD) Vanguard Media Award. She had also become a key public voice for bodily self-determination, famously asserting that her decision to use plastic surgery is “nobody’s business but my
own.”(ABC 2002) She took a similar stance towards her vocal processing. Warner Music executive Rob Dickins reportedly wanted the effect taken off the recording prior to release, to which Cher replied “Over my dead body. Don’t let anyone touch this track, or I’m going to rip your throat out.”(Clayton 2016, 27) Overt vocal processing was taken to highlight the artifice inherent in acts of vocal expression and provided a way to play with the boundaries between male and female voices, as well as that between human and machine. Dominic Pettman has noted the critical affordances of Auto-Tune in its ability to disrupt and erase ways of assigning identity to voice, such that “the culturally gendered binary of the larynx is revealed to be a rather ambiguous modulation of the sonorous spectrum: a woman can sound like a metallic man, while a man can sound like a fiber-optic woman.” (Pettman 2011, 151)
Anthropologist Nick Seaver has compared the way that Auto-Tune troubles conventions of vocal skill with Judith Butler’s analysis of drag performance as a way of challenging
entrenched preconceptions and aesthetics of gender:
Drag provokes unease in those who are invested in traditional gender roles, Auto-Tune in those invested in traditional vocal skills... Where drag dislocates external appearance from biological sex, Autotune dislocates the ability to hit notes from the ability to sing. Now, in its most obvious “Cher effect” incarnation Auto-tune does more than just make someone who can’t sing hit the right notes. It conveys a human-machine fusion, a
matching of precision with imprecision, and it does so in a way that is legible. You know that T-Pain is singing through Auto-Tune, and you won’t mistake him for a very
precisely melismatic singer. In drag, the signifiers of female (or male) gender are
performed, but in a way that highlights their performance. The legible use of Auto-Tune can be so discomforting to those invested in vocal skill because it denies the need for skill, but also because it always refers back to the intended use of the tool. (Seaver 2009) The analogy between digital tuning and the practice of drag performance highlights how the topic of legibility is reconfigured between covert and overt tuning. Questions of legibility in the context of covert tuning concern whether or not the algorithm is able to correctly parse (and thereby correctly correct) a signal. Auto-Tune is in-scripted so as to make voices legible to it. Legibility for the engineer means preparing a recording within the context of the DAW and tuning software so as to accomplish the legibility of the tuning act. Legibility is accomplished as demarcation between what is supposed to be there and what needs to be fixed. Seaver points out that, in the context of overt tuning, what becomes legible is the tuning per se, and that this move has the subversive effect of decoupling criteria of technical pitch-accuracy from received
understandings of skill, while also drawing attention to the means by which they are usually articulated together in the first place.
Osvaldo Oyola, in his essay “In Defense of Auto-Tune” has similarly suggested that digital tuning implies a critique of “the authority of the arbiters of talent” in the same way that Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as a challenge to the “aura” of an artwork:
Mechanical reproduction may “pry an object from its shell” and destroy its aura and authority–demonstrating the democratic possibilities in art as it is repurposed–but I contend that auto-tune goes one step further. It pries singing free from the tyranny of talent and its proscriptive aesthetics. (Oyola 2011)
Critically resonant readings have also emerged from scholars working traditions of African and Afro-American Studies and Black critical theory. Alexander Weheliye read overt pitch correction (which he called the “vocoder effect”) as part of a broader practice of
technological mediation of the voice in black popular music, including the use of talk boxes, and “telephone voice” effects. Overtly technologizing the voice, in his account, becomes a way of creating layers of meaning and challenging tacitly racialized conceptions of the voice. Nielson draws specifically on Weheliye’s observation that many of these sonic tropes have the effect of aestheticizing surveillance tactics such as wiretapping as part of the musical text. (Nielson 2010, 1264) He locates the overt use of auto-tune within a larger tradition of “Black signification through recontextualization using existing elements (words, technologies, fashions, etc.) in unique ways to create new meaning.” (Nielson 2010, 1262) The practice of “sampling” in hip hop, for example involves
an invocation of another's voice, sometimes dozens of voices from dozens of times and places in a given piece, it effectively works to deemphasize individual rappers and producers by delocalizing their presence across a vast continuum of place and time. In effect, rappers and producers willingly undermine their presence with sampling by immersing themselves in a sonic tradition that is far greater than the individual. (Nielson 2010, 1263)
Citing what he takes to be an instance of vocoding in Tupac Shakur’s 1996 track “Can’t C Me,” he emphasizes the way that the effect is used as an “obscuring force” that simultaneously complicates the identification of the individual voice and reinforces a broader Black musical tradition of repurposing and redistributing vocal identities. Rayvon Fouche has argued
specifically for an increased attention towards practices of Black signification in STS and the history of technology, developing the concept of “black vernacular technological creativity” in order to “describe the ways African American people interact with material forms and affects of technology.”(Fouche 2006, 641) Fouche builds on Joel Dinerstein’s concept of the Techno- dialogic, or the way in which “”the presence (or ‘voice’) of machinery became integral to the cultural production of African American storytellers, dancers, blues singers, and jazz musicians,’ … how, during live artistic performances, black ‘musicians brought the power of machines under artistic control and thus modeled the possibility of individual style within a technological
society.’”(641) One example of black vernacular creativity is the practice of “scratching,” or the manual manipulation of a record on a turntable. Fouche writes:
When DJs began scratching, they subverted the fundamental meaning constructed for record players as well as for that of the LP records. What is significant about this basic maneuver is that it drastically diverges from the principal meaning embedded in the technological network associated with records and record players: to listen to prerecorded sound/music. DJs were thus able to creatively reconceive the technological products associated with recorded music and the knowledge associated with their functions based on their own black/ethnic musical sensibilities. (Fouche 2006, 655)
In his attention to the “technological vernacular” as a way of recovering the critical and innovative practices of black communities, Fouche is also in conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theoretical explication of the African-American discursive practice of “Signifyin(g).” To “Signify on” something is to engage in a form of linguistic deep play which multiplies, layers, and rearranges meanings, often to a subversive effect.(Gates, Henry Louis 1988) In his genealogy of the term Gates connects Signifyin(g) to the partially synonymous practice of “the Dirty Dozens:”
“a very elaborate game traditionally played by black boys, in which the participants insult each other’s relatives, especially their mothers. The object of the game is to test
“Doing the dozens” remains an enduring tradition, especially in online contexts. As Judy Isaksen observes in her study of Hip Hop and the construction of masculinity among young men, forums like BlackPlanet host threads dedicated to dozens and signifyin(g). In a 2009, for example, commenter A-Deuce asked his interlocutor Benson to “Tell me why yo mama so dumb she thought T-Pain was a medical condition.”39 As with many instances of Signification, it is all too easy to underestimate the complexity of A-Deuce’s line. Behind the apparent insult against Benson’s mother’s intelligence (or at least cultural awareness) there is a riff on the sentiment, common by 2009, that T-Pain (whose legal name is Faheem Najm) was not so much an artist as a pathology. T-Pain’s work has been described using phrases like “the death of
music.”(Matousek 2015) In his 2009 single “Death of Auto-Tune” Jay-Z turns Najm’s stage name into a verb as he calls on hip hop to “get back to rap, you T-Paining too much.” Katherine Turner, meanwhile, has used the concept of signfyin(g) to argue that a critique of T-Pain (and, by extension, overt tuning) based on imputations of laziness, ignorance, or lack of talent,
fails to recognize this activity – the rejection of auto-tune’s literal application (that is, as a pitch corrective) – as sustaining a tradition of techno-black cultural syncretism that has attended hip hop since its inception. Such critics and communities succumb to the cleverness of T-Pain, who exposed their inability to perceive the non-literal and spotlighted the hubris of those unwilling to extend him the capacity for figurative expression. In short, they suffer the same failure as the Lion in the Signifying Monkey Tale… In combination, irony, Signifyin(g), and techno-black cultural syncretism reflect a single motivation to revise and resituate texts and technologies, to exploit the semantic space between literal and figurative expression, and to maneuver within this space in an effort to combat inequality, to challenge social imbalance and injustice, or simply to rebut harsh treatment by music critics. (Turner 2016)
Taking T-Pain’s vocal aesthetic as a practice of signifyin(g) – as a way of playing with voice, expectation, and meaning, perhaps in part as a way to “test emotional strength” – provides a
thicker, and in many ways more adequate description of how he has repurposed Auto-Tune. It explains, for example, why Najm uses the effect even though he actually does appear to possess a conventionally talented “natural” singing voice. (Kelley 2014) It also helps explain the
professed depth of his engagement with the technology itself, particularly his knowledge of its development and the ways that moves with the voice:
I can firmly say that nobody has looked into Auto-Tune the way I have. You know what I’m saying? Like I’ve looked into Auto-Tune. I’ve literally met the inventor of Auto- Tune. I’ve talked to him about the way that Auto-Tune was invented. Auto-Tune was invented by this guy who used to be an oil digger. This guy used to work on a oil rig, and they used to send sonar signals and tones down in the ground, and if it came back a different tone up to where your equipment was, then that means you, that determines if you’ve got oil or not. So you send a signal and if it comes back a different tone then it changes the tone like, oil will change the tone so it’s like he used that same math to make Auto-Tune. And it’s like you send a tone into ProTools and it sends you the right tone back. And a lot of math went into that shit and just some shit that’s more complicated than — it would take us fucking a billion minutes to explain this shit to regular
motherfuckers. But, like, I really studied this shit, and I know for a fact that nobody has sat down in the studio and studied this shit that much. Nobody has done that. Because it happened too fast. They didn’t have time to do it. I studied Auto-Tune two years before I used it once. And I know it happened too fast. After I used it, n***as just started coming out of nowhere. So it happened too fast for them to know how that shit works. And I know I studied that shit and I know the technology. I know why it catches certain notes. I know why it doesn’t catch certain notes. I know why the shit works the way it works and I know n***as ain’t did that. For sure… (Todd 2014)
He re-tells the auto-tune origin story in a way that makes it his own. Hildebrand appears as a former “oil digger,” and the functional connection between seismic analysis and the skilled use of auto-tune forms the expertise that Najm claims with respect to the technology. He re- inscripts both the narrative of auto-tune as well as the “manual” language for how it ought to be used. Where, from Antares’ perspective, the T-Pain approach was incorrect, Najm argues that his own approach is the correct one with respect to his colleagues who misuse it. Among the
West. T-Pain assisted on West’s album 808s and Heartbreak, which made use of auto-tune throughout and marked the beginning of West’s continued use of the effect. Regarding the tuning on Heartbreak, Najm was quoted as saying
Kanye uses it, but he doesn’t use it correctly. He makes great music with it, but the way that I use it and the way that I’ve shown Chris and Jamie to use it, he doesn’t use it that way,” he said. “He sings without it first, and then he puts it on it. ... You don’t know how it’s going to come out. You can’t catch your mistakes before that happens. Sometimes he gets a little wobbly and things like that. (Branch 2014)
Where T-Pain went against auto-tune’s prescribed corrective use, repurposing it as an overt effect, he continued to reinscribe it as well, labeling West’s use of the effect “incorrect” because it is not monitored live (the very thing about T-Pain’s use that Alpert had initially considered “incorrect.”) For Najm, Auto-Tune was not a gloss that gets thrown on after the fact, but an instrument and technique that one could master. He claims a particular depth of
knowledge of the software itself, both as a way of distinguishing himself from others who have adopted a similar technique but don’t “really” know how to use, and as a way of situating himself in a broader history of technologically altered voices as a musical gesture. On the one hand he prides himself on having met Auto-Tune’s inventor, on the other hand he claims (via the signifyin(g) techniques of naming and punning) a techno-aesthetic kinship with talk box pioneer Roger Troutman and nu-jack swing vocoderist Teddy Riley: “let me get a moment of silence, for the late great Roger Troutman/ Y’all n****s ain’t holdin him down, so we had to put me at you/ B***h, I’m Teddy Pain, the son of Teddy Riley.” (Najm & Khaled 2008) In a 2008 interview with the New Yorker, Faheem Najm (T-Pain’s legal name) noted that he decided not to use Auto-Tune on a song about his son.(Frere-Jones 2008) Najm’s son, who was later diagnosed with autism, would serve as the inspiration for T-Pain’s Stoicville: The Phoenix project. The
titular Stoicville, he explains, is a place “where everybody is stoic—where nobody has emotions. You don’t get shit from anybody in Stoicville. You don’t get people saying or doing fucked up shit to you. Everybody’s just stoic. Nobody has emotions and everybody minds their own fucking business. That’s the town for me. That’s where I want to live.” (Neyfakh 2014) Though the album has not yet debuted as of this writing, the first single, “Intro” features none of his signature vocal effect. The possible exception is what seems to be a melismatic and pitch-shifted female vocal line running in reverse, which echoes through the song’s outro. (Najm 2014) Najm’s repurposing of Auto-Tune as the “T-Pain effect” involved re-inscribing the popular narrative of auto-tune’s development as well as his own development as a “rapper ternt sanga.”(Neyfakh 2014)
Beyond the world of western major label pop music, overt tuning came into particularly wide use in the popular musics of Northwestern Africa. Mdou Moctar, a popular Tuareg guitarist and singer from Abalak, Niger, began using auto-tune after his recording engineer recommended it during a session in a Nigerian studio. His song “Tahoultine,” featuring heavily distorted auto- tuned vocals, became a huge hit among young listeners in the Sahel region, who trade music with one another via the memory cards of their cell phones. Ethnomusicologist Chris Kirkley, who first brought Moctar’s music to American and European audiences through a 2011 release titled Music From Saharan Cellphones on his Sahel Sounds Label, describes his initial reaction to Moctar’s use of tuning:
What I really like was its autotune, that crazy blown-out autotune. Like if Cher knew