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The Effects of Autotune on the Music Industry

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Throughout the years, musicians and artists have used many different techniques in order to make themselves sound different and to sell records. Quite recently, many musicians and artists have been using a pitch correcting program called Autotune. One rapper/hip-hop artist, T-Pain, is mainly responsible for transforming the use of Autotune. Autotune was first invented in 1997 by Dr. Harold “Andy” Hildebrand. Dr. Hildebrand founded Antares Audio Technologies in 1990 after working as a research scientist for Exxon from 1976 until 1989, when he realized that the same technology he used to detect oil reserves in the sea floor could also be used to correct a singer’s unruly notes. After leaving Exxon, Hildebrand created a program called …show more content…

Although T-Pain started Auto-Tuning his voice because nobody else was doing it and he wanted to sound different, nowadays it seems that just about everybody sounds the same. “It used to make me sound different… Now I sound like everybody else again” said T-Pain (The New Tune). In response to the sudden explosion of artists that are using Auto-Tune, T-Pain said that people need to start paying him respect – and paying him literally – for their use of Auto-Tune. T-Pain said that other artists are ruining the use of Auto-Tune and that it’s basically over for them unless they start to pay up (www.mtv.com).
While many people may criticize and ridicule the use of Auto-Tune and talk about how it is “ruining” the music industry by leading people to believe that recording artists are pitch-perfect, there is one thing that nobody can deny; it sells records. And there is nothing that musicians and artists want to do more than sell records. Auto-Tune was originally intended to help oil companies find out where oil reserves are save companies lots of money by not having to dig up the group looking for oil when they could find out just where the oil was. Over the course of time, that program evolved into one of the most prominent and recurring effects in the music industry.
Although

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