Auto-Tune does all that at the push of a button. Love-hate relationship. A magic button that makes everyone sing in perfect key was, unsurprisingly, an instant hit with the industry: "Within a year we had sold to every major studio in the world, and that was a year or two after Cher did her song 'Believe'", Hildebrand recalls.
Here are his tasting notes on that song: "I thought it was really cool! Even if they used a bad setting, or what I call bad setting since I didn't design it to be used like that: it makes this robotic effect because it changes the pitch instantly from note to note. But the jury is still out on whether Auto-Tune was a boon for the music industry, or a disaster: in , Time magazine included it in the list of The 50 Worst Inventions , calling it "a technology that can make bad singers sound good and really bad singers sound like robots.
Indie band Death Cab for Cutie showed up at the Grammys wearing blue ribbons to "raise awareness against Auto-Tune abuse" , and fervent Auto-Tune critic Jay-z released a song in entitled D.
Britney Spears notoriously fell into an Auto-Tune controversy in mid, when a vanilla recording of her song Alien was leaked and compared , rather unfavorably, to the autotuned version on the album Britney Jean.
But what does its inventor think? It seems that Auto-Tune might be to music what Photoshop is to photography: everybody uses it, but no one's too keen to admit it. Tuning into your heartbeat.
After having sorted singing -- "music's second most popular instrument" -- Hildebrand is now going after the first: guitars. Next up, your heartbeat: "There's a new kind of device called the embedded defibrillator: it's a pacemaker implanted in the chest that monitors heartbeat irregularities and releases energy pulses to correct anomalies.
The problem is that sometimes the software fails to detect the heartbeat, and we're hoping to fix that. The technology, in the form of an algorithm, will soon be embedded into these pacemakers. And we have a feeling it might not even stop there. An engineer by trade, Hildebrand had always been a musician at heart. His undergraduate engineering degree had been funded by music scholarships and teaching flute lessons.
Naturally, after leaving Landmark and the oil industry, Hildebrand decided to return to school to study composition more intensively. But he encountered a problem: when he attempted to make his own flute samples, he found the quality of the sounds to be ugly and unnatural. First, he created a processing algorithm that greatly condensed the audio data, allowing for a smoother, more natural-sounding sustain and timbre. Then, he packaged this algorithm into a piece of software called Infinity , and handed it out to composers.
A glimpse at Infinity's interface from an old handbook; courtesy of Andy Hildebrand. Coincident similar technologies include correlation statics determination , linear predictive coding deconvolution , synthesis forward modeling , formant analysis spectral enhancement , and processing integrity to minimize artifacts.
All of these technologies are shared amongst music and geophysical applications. At the time, no other pitch correction software existed. The major roadblock was that analyzing and correcting pitch in real-time required processing a very large amount of sound wave data.
He realized that it could also be applied to music:. With autocorrelation, you have a clearly identifiable event that tells you what the period of repetition for repeated peak values is. When we asked him to provide a simple explanation of what happens, computationally, when a voice signal enters his software, he opened his desk and pulled out thick stacks of folders, each stuffed with hundreds of pages of mathematical equations.
Hildebrand realized he was limited by the technology, and instead of giving up, he found a way to work within it using math.
It was a trick — a mathematical trick. Hildebrand built the Auto-Tune program over the course of a few months in early , on a specially-equipped Macintosh computer.
This time, it was received a bit differently. At the time, recording pitch-perfect vocal tracks was incredibly time-consuming for both music producers and artists.
The standard practice was to do dozens, if not hundreds, of takes in a studio, then spend a few days splicing together the best bits from each take to a create a uniformly in-tune track. When Auto-Tune was released, says Hildebrand, the product practically sold itself. With the help of a small sales team, Hildebrand sold Auto-Tune which also came in hardware form, as a rack effect to every major studio in Los Angeles.
The studios that adopted Auto-Tune thrived: they were able to get work done more quickly doing just one vocal take, through the program, as opposed to dozens — and as a result, took in more clients and lowered costs. Soon, studios had to integrate Auto-Tune just to compete and survive.
Images from Auto-Tune's patent. I put him out of business overnight. It was used subtly and unobtrusively to correct notes that were just slightly off-key, and producers were wary to reveal its use to the public.
Hildebrand explains why:. This secrecy, however, was short-lived: Auto-Tune was about to have its coming out party. Unbeknownst to them, this was the start of something much bigger: for the first time, Auto-Tune had crept from the shadows.
He explains:. For faster songs, the notes are short, the pitch needs to be changed quickly. Nonetheless, it continues to be used across all genres of music whether your know it or not.
James Blake has coaxed warm, soulful character from it; other artists, like Aphex Twin point to the otherworldly and not-quite-human aspects in a more unsettling way. It wasn't something you were ever supposed to hear, a kind of musical sleight-of-hand trick designed to make subtle corrections and perfect a singer's pitch.
But buried in Auto-Tune's numerous settings is "discretize. Techniques for altering or polishing a vocal performance are as old as recording itself. What made Auto-Tune unique was its use of advanced digital signal processing algorithms. Its creator, Dr. Andy Hildebrand, first experimented with these sequences while studying electric engineering at Chicago's University of Illinois, before going on to work with Exxon between and In , Dr. Hildebrand returned to his love of music he played flute professionally when he was younger and founded Jupiter Systems, which would later become Antares Audio Technology—the company that struck gold when it debuted Auto-Tune in Perhaps surprisingly, the man behind the technology which celebrates its 20th anniversary next year isn't some slick New York recording executive.
Instead, Dr. Hildebrand lives in the small town of Felton in the forests of central California, and prefers Mozart to T-Pain. Do you ever feel like you created a monster?
Andy Hildebrand: [Laughs] Well, I've certainly created something people love to hate, that's for sure. But, you know, they're the same people, that hate a lot of other things, too—like paying taxes, and other stuff. In a sense, haters will be haters. I heard that Auto-Tune software had its origins in your work as a geophysical engineer, locating oil deposits with sound waves from dynamite blasts.
Oh, is it? My training started at the University of Illinois, where I got a PhD in [electrical engineering] specializing in signal processing.
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