The argument against the mass use of Auto Tune was never about favoring “technical facility over inspiration,” as Alex Pappademas monstrously wrote in a 2011 New York Times editorial. If it were, one would have to believe that “inspiration” supersedes the end product, that a tonal grid is inspiring, and that precision is the goal of 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. It is about narcotizing the revelations contained in the human voice. And it is about a music industry mutating into a talentless celebritocracy.

Dylan famously sang off. Joni Mitchel had an unstable pitch. Johnny Cash, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen all had limited range, often drifting and straining. Billie Holiday bent pitch constantly, valuing emotional phrasing over precision. Ask yourself:

Would these artists 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 unsurprisingly came out of the same modernist 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 used to describe his favorite part of a photo as being a small oddity that seems out of place, and “pricks” the viewer) which makes a compelling song, the key of many deeply human choices.

For me, music very little about the music itself or its technicalities, and more about what the artist is saying, how they say it, and the performance.

Even if the technology improved enough to capture emotional phrasing and the subtle shifts in pitch that shape the human voice, I would still envision the future of the technology as a sort of sophisticated “lithograph” of the human voice, never worth the bounty of the original.

To those who say that Auto Tune is “just an aesthetic choice”: Immanuel Kant argued that beauty reflects moral judgment, and what kind of aesthetic treats as its ideal one in which human irregularity is removed? Why do you want to be a singer so bad and yet must shove your voice into a horrendous cookie-cutter?

Just go and listen to a song from the 1960s.

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.”

Let’s celebrate the human voice! With all of its honest defects.