Auto-Tune

Auto-Tune is technology created by Antares Technologies in 1997 to correct pitches from musical instruments and the human voice. It was almost immediately perverted and used to wreak havoc on American pop music. In 1998, Cher used it in the song “Do You Believe In Love” to give her voice an artificial quality designed to complement her painfully plasticized face. Several years later, rappers adopted the digital effect to give old people one more thing to hate about hip hop. Things that are embraced by rappers-- like big butts, for example-- are soon picked up by young kids from the suburbs, and Auto-Tune would be no different.

Video creators soon began using Auto-Tune, at first parodying the way it was used in popular music, but then turning it into a tool for creating new kinds of content. Chief among these new Auto-Tune artists were The Gregory Brothers, a group that Auto-Tuned Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. They found success when they started Auto-Tuning clips from news broadcasts, but it was Auto-Tuning viral videos and turning them into catchy songs that led them to viral video superstardom.

Autotune videos typically fall into one of several categories:

• Ironic Auto-Tuning, where things are unexpectedly Auto-Tuned, like babies crying for example.
• Auto-Tune “Remixing,” a form of ironic Auto-Tune where new songs are created from existing materials, like viral videos and news broadcasts.
• "Without Auto-Tune,” where Autotune is “removed” and we hear what the singer actually sounds like without the pitch-correcting technology.
• Any video with Britney Spears in it