Trees past as you swivel down the road.  Well, hopefully you’re not swiveling.  You turn on the radio and hope the song that’s playing right now, if the radio even is playing a song at that moment, fits the mood your in.  When all of a sudden this brutally slow beat drops and you don’t know what it is.

            “I’m not lovin you, way I wanted to,” this robotic voice comes on and what seemingly feels like it’s singing.  “Now keep your love lockdown, your love lockdown, you lose.”  You hear it and are so entranced by the deep melody and the haunting voice that isn’t human to your ears.  You wonder what the heck this is.

            This is Auto-tune. 

            Auto-tune is a program that changes the pitch of your voice.  A man who analyzed seismic data for an oil company invented it.  That man’s name is Andy Hildebrand. 

At a dinner party in 1996 Andy was challenged by a guest to make a box that would allow the guest to sing in tune.  After a few months tampering with autocorrelation (the process as to how the oil industry finds potential drill sites by sending sounds waves through the ground) Auto-tune was born. 

The music industry quickly incorporated Auto-tune into the recording process and it became sort of a trade secret.  

People think the only and main use of it is to produce a tantalizing, artificial voice.  But, that is not the case.  The main use of Auto-tune is to fix pitch problems in a recording so that the artist doesn’t have to do a million takes just to get it right. 

The first to use Auto-tune in a way to change the sound of their voice was, believe it or not, Cher.  In her song “Believe” she uses Auto-tune in the chorus, specifically on the word believe where you can really here it.

After a while the trend started to die out.  Then in 2003 Tallahassee native rapper and singer named T-pain (Faheem Najm) comes across the same effects of Auto-tune that Cher used.  “It just worked for my voice” remarks T-pain. 

Since then T-pain has continued to spawn hit after hit along with four Grammy-nominated songs in 2009 and a dozen songs into the top 10 since his debut album.

            Nowadays some artists are using the same technique as T-pain to make their songs fresh, or maybe to draw in listeners with the voice, he even gives lessons.  But almost everyone in the music business uses it to fix his or her voice.

            “Every singer now just presumes that you’ll run their voice through the box.”  Says a Grammy-winning recording engineer, who has had the privilege to work with Britney Spears.

            How else do musicians get their voices to sound almost perfect in recordings?  You don’t think that every singer is perfect do you?  Yeah, theirs a lot of talented people out there who can actually sing and they just need a little touch up. 

            Then there’s the people who couldn’t sing to save their lives, but are still able to pump out chart toppers.  Don’t get us wrong we do love some of their songs and they’re catchy, but is that what music has come down to?