Make Music not AutoTune porn

Forgive me for this rare expletive laced first line. What the fark is it with auto tuned voices being considered
the young hip sound?  Would the inventor of this heinous product please stand up and into an open field to  be properly dispatched by a firing squad? 

Now, do not get me wrong, I am no musical purist pole sitting up on an ivory column denigrating everything but my own preferred genre, nor is this a screed against today’s youth culture.

I dove in head first to the late 80’s synth sound revolution that dispensed with natural instruments. I am also an obsessed fan of Raymond Scott, the 1940’s & 50’s jazz musician who used his hand-built mechanical synthesisers and relay based sequencers to create new, and to some -bizarre, sounds.  


To be hone st vocal treatments of pop and not so pop stars has been a common practice since Les Paul first stacked recording heads and created multi-track and overdubbing. The process was subtle though, a minor tweak to vocals that could match the recording at live events. In this respect I see the value of auto tune in the same vein as outboard gear based on the work of Joe Meek. Similar to Raymond Scott, Joe Meek created his own equipment to process recordings to bring out new dimensions of the emerging rock music scene. 

So, this experimentation and stereotypical overuse is nothing new but there is a greater abuse occurring with auto tune, something  I am calling it  the gallop effect.  

Cindy Gallop is a brand marketing  leader who has also developed several websites including the micro
 action sites “If I Ran the World” and “Make Love Not Porn”.  The latter is an attempt to upend the deleterious effects of porn as sex ed on the under 25 crowd, where acts like ‘the money shot’ are  perceived to be normal and ‘whats supposed to happen’ by both genders. To be clear Ms Gallop’s screed is not anti porn, far from it. What it does fight is a grievous ignorance of the basic facts of sex akin to what 40’s and 50’s mass culture taught (or lacked to tell) their children and what Kinsey railed against - setting in motion a revolution. That cultural shift of openness and honesty eventually led us to a cultural confusion based on a tsunami of readily available media but no grounding in human sexuality from sex ed classes and more importantly parental honesty.

 

The shift in perception that abuse of tools like the now dreaded auto tune (and adult films) begin to alter what characteristics we find to be the height of beauty. Whether  it is the cosmetically enhanced starlets of porn or the equally Frankenstein vocals, the ubiquity overwhelms our frame of reference and imperfections become magnified. When nothing but perceived perfection is acceptable, what happens when you encounter an actual human voice?

Which is why I will still take a warble prone alt-punk singer whose voice carries authentic character over the vocal equivalent of the movie LOOKER’s main foil Cindy, the 1980’s   predecessor to S1m0ne, where perfection has deadly results.  

Of course there is one use of  this device that may just save humanity- Auto Tune the news, Bill and Ted should be so influential. 

 

 

 

 

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