Melodyne

Munich-based Celemony released Melodyne in 2001, built on Peter Neubäcker's work on splitting a recorded note into pitch, duration and timbre. Where Auto-Tune corrects in real time against a scale, Melodyne lays out the whole take after the fact as "blobs" — one per note — that can be moved up, down, shortened or stretched. Vibrato and the slides between notes can be tamed or exaggerated separately.

The breakthrough was Direct Note Access in 2009: editing individual notes inside a polyphonic recording, one string of a strummed guitar chord, which most people had assumed couldn't be done. Most vocal tuning in studios today happens this way, invisibly. Wiring it properly into host applications is what produced the ARA plug-in extension.