Auto-Tune
More info
- Creator
- Andy Hildebrand
- Released
- Owner
- Antares Audio Technologies
- Type
- Pitch-correction plugin
Pitch correction meant to quietly fix bum notes, which instead became one of the most recognisable sounds in pop music.
Andy Hildebrand had spent years interpreting seismic data for the oil industry using autocorrelation, and realised the same maths could find the fundamental of a singing voice. Antares released Auto-Tune in 1997. It measures the pitch, compares it with the nearest note in the chosen scale and nudges the voice there; the "retune speed" control decides how fast.
It was supposed to be inaudible. Then the producers of Cher's "Believe" in 1998 turned retune speed down to zero, so the voice jumped stepwise between notes, and the effect was named after her. T-Pain built a career on it in the 2000s. Today the same technology runs invisibly on almost every vocal and audibly as an instrument — the two uses nobody planned for, in opposite directions.