The following is the first installment of a brand-new blog in which former EM editor Gino Robair speaks out on issues relating to music technology.

For reasons that you can probably figure out, Antares Auto-Tune is one of the few pro-audio tools that nearly everyone knows about. As if to hammer home the fact, there’s even a version of it available for the iPhone.

Kids can hardly wait to add the much-maligned effect to their own voices! Although Auto-Tune is not the only pitch-correction product on the market, the name has already become synonymous with the technology, just as the name Xerox has come to mean photo-copying.

As Nathaniel Kunkel noted in his March ’09 InSession column, Auto-Tune greatly simplified a chore that required at least two tape decks, a tuner, an Eventide H3000, and many hours to complete. Vocal tuning was already being done by the pros long before Cher’s production team used it so blatantly on “Believe”: Antares simply made the process more convenient, and as a result, more pervasive.

Musicians and listeners alike still treat this technology as the recording industry’s “dirty little secret,” primarily because it can turn someone who is musically challenged into a convincing singer with a mere press of a button. The only talent we need is behind the glass, rather than in front of it, right?

But as Kunkel and other engineers who use it suggest, pitch-correction technology is changing how we listen to music. For example, he notes that, after working with pitch correction for a while, it takes time for his ears to readjust to the idiosyncrasies in songs recorded before tuning technology existed.

I think the decidedly modern sound of quantized melodies has changed our perception for the better. First, pitch-correction technology reminds us how aesthetically satisfying subtle differences in intonation can be in a performance. That may seem like a no-brainer, but try to pitch correct an otherwise musical take without removing the essence of the performance. You’ll see right away how a vocal part has more going for it than a array of discrete pitches.

Second, the technology gives us an opportunity to hear what “perfectly in tune” actually sounds like, and the results are not always desirable. Done incorrectly, pitch correction can make the voice sound mechanical. Artists such as T-Pain and Akon take advantage of that aspect of the technology, figuring out exciting ways to misuse it for artistic purposes. But there’s no excuse when the tuning is unintentionally obvious on a pop-song vocal, and you can hear the algorithm working in the background.

And that’s why I think the far-reaching impact of pitch correction is ultimately good: These artifacts teach listeners to pay closer attention to the subtle intonation cues in music. And the greater an awareness they have of musical details, the more likely they’re going to see through the BS that is often being passed off as art. There is a whole lot more to a song than perfect intonation.

This week’s assignment:
Put yourself in the role of a producer who has access to all of today’s software tools. Pick a classic song from the ‘50s, ‘60s, or ‘70s, and listen carefully for any pitch discrepancies in the vocal part. Identify those places where the singer misses the mark, ever so slightly. Think about how you would fix these problems if you were handed this track to mix. What artifacts might you encounter? Work hard to imagine how you’d clean them up.

Once you have finished, step back for a moment and consider whether your pitch corrections would have increased the musicality and aesthetic value of the song? Would it have robbed anything from the artist or presentation? These are not meant to be rhetorical questions: I want to know what you think and discover.

(Note that, with a product such as Celemony Melodyne Editor, which lets you tune individual notes within a polyphonic recording, it is not inconceivable that content owners will go through their back catalogs and fix the pitch errors on their classic masters. What better way to get you to buy those records yet again?)

Postscript
For those of you who were horrified by stereo versions of Beatles albums that were originally mono, imagine what will happen if they decide to correct the slightly out of tune vocal parts in the next repackaged release. (You didn’t think the Beatles Industrial Complex was going to stop with the latest box set, did you? I guarantee that you will buy these recordings again, on whatever format wins out in the next decade, when the high-res versions they have in the vault hits the streets.)

Cool Link
Ignore the fact that this track has a corrected-vocal sound: Imagine the rehearsal that went into this excellent one-shot/no-edit video to Lipdub’s “I Gotta Feeling.”

Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Sokurov would be proud.