If you’ve heard any pop music at all over the past several years, you’ve probably heard Auto-Tune, seasoning and sometimes overwhelming the performances of the gifted and mediocre alike.
It forces sounds to conform to a particular musical key, eliminating the hundreds of deviant microtones that distinguish the human vocal instrument—which may be why digitally pitch-corrected voices can sound a bit robotic to the ear, if tuneful.
At times, that’s good. Pure entertainment (singer T-Pain in whatever club he’s frequenting at the moment) or philosophy (songwriter Sufjan Stevens ruminating on his humanity in “Impossible Soul”), these trendy, computerized modifications can be legitimately artistic, perhaps communicating a persistent bit of postmodern angst: We chafe at our human frailty, yet suspect that our vulnerability might be our most interesting, meaningful quality.
Then there’s the corrective use of Auto-Tune, the one that calls the singing ability of Glee cast members into question. There’s an important place for that kind of precision—manufacturing and engineering come to mind. But in content creation—and I know this will sound radical coming from someone who reviews content quality for a living—I’ve been wondering if the compulsive Auto-Tuners of the world aren’t killing something important.
Could control-freakitude actually be getting in the way of quality content?
Those of us who steward quality are earnest in our efforts. We list do’s and don’ts, we establish best practices, we devise procedures and processes, aiming for the clean, the bright, the clear and the replicable. I’m down with that, constitutionally so. (Just last week, my mom declared, “I love a manual!” and I could only wryly reflect on the genetic thrall of documentation.)
But I also know that the terrible, the terrifying, and the simply messy can be profound and gorgeous and revealing and rich—and that maybe some of the joy of exactitude comes from its contrast to, its real or imagined mastery of, the disturbing power of the chaotic.
Human judgment—our ability to hear nuance, to see shades, to establish context—is one of our most valuable. It’s why spell check, while useful, isn’t a panacea, and why corrective Auto-Tune will likely continue to be controversial. And as essential as our attention to the technical and theoretical aspects of our craft can be, in the end, content is meant to communicate, to create connections.
The best we can do for our content may be to celebrate and illuminate the unique, very human voices it represents.
