Pina LombThe argument against the mass use of Auto Tune was never about favoring “technical facility over inspiration,” as Alex Pappademas monstrously wrote in a 2011 Times editorial. If it were, one would have to believe that inspiration is more important than the end product, that a tonal grid is inspiring, and that precision is the highest ideal in art.
Today, Auto Tune is treated as an aesthetic choice no more harmful than preferring vanilla or strawberry. But it is much more like sprinkles or anesthetic on your ice cream. This is not about technical ability, it is about narcotizing the revelations contained in the human voice.
Dylan famously sang off, and Joni Mitchel had an unstable pitch. Johnny Cash, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen all had limited range and often drifted and strained. Billie Holiday bent pitch constantly, valuing emotional phrasing over precision. Are we saying that these artists would have been even better if they didn’t have to think about pitch?
Should we clean up Matisse’s lines and curves, and have a computer recreate them so they are more linear? Is a print of a painting worth as much as the original?
The truth is that the human voice was never meant to abide by a grid. “A” equalling 440 Hz was not an ancient or natural constant. For most of history, pitch varied widely, and its formal standardization in 1939 came out of the same modern impulse toward uniformity, central control, and industrial scale that coincided with some of the greatest atrocities against humanity in recent history.
More than being willing to hear someone who is off, flat, sharp, strained, and uneven, I believe that those moments are the exact punctum (to repurpose a word from Roland Barthes, meant for photography, in which he describes his favorite part of a photograph as being a small oddity that seems out of place) which makes a compelling song, alongside many other deeply human choices.
It is true that Auto Tune is an aesthetic choice. But Kant argued that beauty reflects moral judgment, and what kind of aesthetic treats as its ideal one in which human irregularity must be removed?
Just listen to a song from the 1960s. As we march into the future, we must decide what is kept and what is thrown away to make room for new things.
To those who defend Auto Tune as an achievement or some sort of progress: why are you ashamed of being human?
All of this is summarized best, for me, by dancer and choreographer Doris Humphrey:
“Movement, whether it be dance or any other movement, has its own laws, which are not the laws of mechanics.”
Bob Loblaw
Richard Aubern
Editors