On April 10 2011 19:05 JoFritzMD wrote: Autotune can be done well as shown in this song by imogen heaps
Yeah but the way she does it is different. When she performs that song live it's with a keyboard playing the notes and her voice going through what she does with the keyboard. Whole different beast. Either way it creates a different sound which is what autotune CAN do when implemented creatively.
edit: Forgot how good Imogen Heap was. Very talented chick.
I think it can be neat to have like a chorus with autotune for an interesting effect, but to have an entire song with the singer's voice autotuned it is just ridiculous.
I am not musically talented in any way but I think it is similar to the wammy bar on a guitar. If you play an entire guitar solo using it, it is super annoying, but every few notes here and there can make a song sound a bit better.
I haven't heard a song which uses autotune which I like. That said, I hate pop and hiphop so maybe its just that I guess for me personally, autotune puts the nail in the coffin.
Auto-Tune is a joke. It's literally means for an insignificant vocalist to get away with their inferiority. There's nothing more to it. Why just plug the words into Text-To-Speech, as far as I'm concerned. It takes just as much effort.
That song isn't actually auto-tuned (at least not when she does it live). She uses a harmonizer and vocoder. The effect is similar in terms of how her voice sounds but they're not quite the same thing.
The point still remains though considering that the harmonizer/vocoder combo is modifying her voice to do things it couldn't otherwise do (a la autotune).
Auto-Tune is a joke. It's literally means for an insignificant vocalist to get away with their inferiority. There's nothing more to it. Why just plug the words into Text-To-Speech, as far as I'm concerned. It takes just as much effort.
That's only one application of autotune, and often when autotune is used during production it is for the purpose of saving an artist's time (less takes) and therefore money. Perhaps artists shouldn't need autotune to record flawlessly, but that's a different conversation for a different day.
It has plenty of other uses. Just because you disagree with one way of using it doesn't mean you have to label the whole thing as a joke. Why have less tools available to you when you could have more?
The poll on the front page is fairly biased. I'm not sure if this argument has been brought up already but there are definitely shades of grey just because of the subjective nature of art not two explicit opinions as shown in the poll. Autotune can be similarly related to the introduction of the synth where people could get sounds that were just like the instrument being emulated. You could argue that musicians that have taken years to learn their instrument just get them emulated near perfectly by a machine would be cheated by others taking the easier alternative where they are just utilizing available technology. People are more than welcome to voice their opinion on whether or not they "hate" some art form but I don't see how they are going to achieve anything especially on such a subject as art. There are art forms, a fair few of them, that I don't agree with and can't for the life of me understand why people would bother using their valuable time listening/watching/playing them. It would be insensitive and incite a fair amount of anger from a large community of people if I told them that.
On April 10 2011 20:04 Fog-of-War wrote: If autotune is an art. it would be like finger painting. I mean sure it's art, but c'mon anyone with half a brain can do it.
The art is, like in all artforms, in doing it well and not anyone with half a brain can do that.
It's just a tool for musicians, albeit much easier done horribly wrong than most other tools and effects. Good musicians will make good use of autotune, horrible musicians will earn lots of money. Just the natural cycle of musicianship.
Auto tune is as much an instrument to musicians as electric guitars or keyboards. It doesn't matter if it's a natural voice or autotuned, if it sounds good then anything goes. This oldskool elitist mentality that autotuning is bad has got to stop.
It's just a tool, whether it's art or not depends on how it is beeing used.
To my knowledge many famous composers in the history only saw musicians as their tool, too. They didn't care about these people and their instruments, all they wanted is their music to be played perfectly the way it was supposed to be. Many would probably have loved autotune etc, as long as it can give them the results they want to.
I only have a problem with autotune if singers who don't need it use it. For musicians who can't sing, autotune is necessary or their song will suck, so I don't blame them for using it. As for the poll, yes autotune is art. Just because most people don't like it doesn't mean it's not art. It may not be good art but it's still art nonetheless. No autotune isn't dead. Netizens can whine all they want about autotune, but people are still buying and listening to autotuned songs and that's the bottom line.
EPT
I guess for me personally, autotune puts the nail in the coffin.
