Motor Mouth

While pop music isn't anything like rocket science, it took a geophysicist to figure out how to clean up wrong notes. Twenty years ago Harold "Andy" Hildebrand, who'd spent nearly two decades doing seismic data research in the oil industry, started a company, Jupiter Systems (since renamed Antares), that applied mathematical models and digital-signal processing technology to musical applications. Its first program was used to create seamless synthesizer loops.

The idea for Auto-Tune came during lunch one day, when Hildebrand was jokingly asked by the wife of a sales rep to come up with an algorithm that might make her singing sound better. "We were discussing what I should do next, and she said, 'Maybe you could make a box for me that would make my voice in tune,' " Hildebrand says from his Northern California office. "And everybody just stared down at their lunch. . . . Everybody knew it was impossible and was therefore a stupid idea." So of course, he says, he had to do it.

The result was a software plug-in that corrects a singer's pitch, in a way that's theoretically imperceptible to the untrained ear. "The automatic algorithm compares the pitch of the singer to a scale, then gradually moves the singer's pitch toward the scale note," Hildebrand says.

Introduced by Antares in 1997, the Auto-Tune application was revolutionary. It reduced the need for -- and expense of -- doing countless vocal retakes in pursuit of a perfect end-to-end vocal; it also allowed singers (J. Lo) with pitch problems (Britney) to sound somewhat palatable (Cassie).

Auto-Tune and pitch-correction programs like it are now used in just about every pop genre. There's also a version that can be used during concerts. (Is it live? Yes. Are you hearing the music naturally, without "invisible" fixes? Maybe not.)

It's so prevalent that Nashville producers rave when they encounter mainstream country singers, like Ashton Shepherd, who can record without any pitch correction. Harvey Mason Jr., a successful pop and R&B songwriter-producer, conservatively estimates that 60 percent of recording artists are using Auto-Tune as it was originally intended. But, he says: "I don't think I've ever had an artist ask for it. Most artists assume they don't need it."

He adds: "A lot of times, you're just trying to salvage a great performance that you might lose because of one bad note. You're not using it for total pitch correction. But some people just slam it, and everything they sing comes out in tune. You have to be careful with it -- sometimes Auto-Tune sterilizes performances and makes them sound clinical."

Is it cheating?

"I don't engage in those conversations," Hildebrand says. "I just make software."

He laughs, then notes that he's making money, too. Lots of it. "The industry's going to have to make up its own mind [if] it's a monster or not." (And anyway, says Hildebrand, who earned union scale in a symphony orchestra while in high school and studied composition at Rice University's Shepard School of Music: "Frankly, I don't listen to pop music.")

Summers, the satellite radio programmer, says the answer to the cheating question "really depends on what you use music for. If you're talking about singing at its purest, then absolutely. It's kind of the equivalent to taking steroids at the Olympics. If you're a singer, sing. But this is the entertainment industry. Take the J. Lo example. It's a look, a feel, a vibe. It doesn't really matter how she sings. You come to see her in concert, you know she's not doing a Whitney [Houston]. You're not there for that. You're there to be entertained."

Ne-Yo, the neo-classic soul man who has the No. 1 single on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart this week in "Miss Independent," says he despises Auto-Tune. "It takes the emotion out of your voice. And it's really used in the place of having actual vocal ability or skill."

But, he adds, "T-Pain has figured out a way to use it to where he can get a point across with it. Personally, I dig his style."

In T-Pain's hands, Auto-Tune is used as a tool, not a crutch -- a sort of flavor enhancer that falls somewhere between sweet cream butter and MSG. To achieve the effect, the Auto-Tune's "retune speed" setting is adjusted to zero; rather than moving a vocal toward the nearest correct note gradually, it's processed almost instantly, resulting in an unnatural stair step in pitch that makes human vocals sound unhuman. "It really wasn't meant to be used that way," Hildebrand says, "but it's becoming really popular."

So much so that Antares is releasing a discounted, stripped-down version of Auto-Tune this month to coincide with the release of T-Pain's album. Whereas Auto-Tune plug-ins typically sell for more than $300, Antares is offering the Auto-Tune EFX for $99 through Guitar Center -- "for the guy who wants a simple T-Pain effect or simple pitch correction," Hildebrand says.

This, of course, means more T-Pain copycats are inevitable. Some will be more famous than others: Sean "Diddy" Combs has already announced that his next album will feature a heavy dose of Auto-Tuned vocals, which actually sounds like an upgrade, given how monochromatic the mogul-rapper's voice tends to be in recorded form. Christina Aguilera -- a bona fide belter who doesn't need the help -- has hinted that she might experiment with the effect, too.

And eventually, this too shall pass -- just like the trend of using speeded-up soul samples in hip-hop several years ago, and the "radio voice" trend in R&B around 2001-2002, when certain lines were filtered and processed so that they'd sound as if they were being sung through a transistor radio or a telephone.

Until then, the frontman for the futuristic hip-hop movement has an idea. "Everybody's singing like me," T-Pain says, "so I figure maybe I should rap like everybody else."