Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I get the worst resistance when I say it but I think music died when autotune became ubiquitous. Curiously this happened at the same time that Napster hit so piracy got a lot of the blame.

Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)

Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.

When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."

View on HN

Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching with vocal track slicing and pitching? Or do you mean splicing together tons of different takes to create the perfect vocal track?

As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.

This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.

Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.

Speaking of Max Martin, I had wanted to reference the Weeknd's new album Dawn FM into the discussion somewhere, which was coproduced by Martin. That is a heavily produced album, a lot of influence from '80s New Wave and Michael Jackson pop all the way to obscure internet retro syntwhave, yet the vocals were very human and soulful and not at all unemotional. YMMV, as always.

They clearly mean the shitty vocal artefacts from pitch correction software pushed to the extreme. That's really not in the same paradigm as multi-take / double-tracked vocals.

While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.

Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. There's nothing really subtle about it.

EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.

'One More Time' was antares also.

I'm also aware of what a vocoder is - even own a couple.

> Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings.

It's extremely widespread, even in classical music, but "literally all" is simply not true.

I'll say this. If you're in the middle of this culture you might not see it clearly.

I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know.

Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance.

One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.)

He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap.

Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll."

Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o

what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.

Exactly this. Complaining about auto-tune is a self report to not understanding what the loaded umbrella term means. Every artist adds some amount of pitch correction to their voice just like they add some level of compression to their voice.

When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly.

Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.

Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.

The point is that most people cannot tell when the vocal is adjusted to the grid, because if they could, they would be complaining about it on every single vocal track since the 80s.

"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.

Pointing out that there is greater complexity than merely Antares Autotune doesn't change the point at all. If music is snapped to 12-tone equal temperament it loses something for some listeners. You don't need to know the technical details (and I do know at least some of them, having developed vocal pitch detection algorithms) to have an aesthetic response to that.

That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.

I think most laypeople's definition of autotune would be "that thing in every T-Pain song" or maybe "that thing that Cher did"[1]

It's a very distinctive sound, horrendously overused and occupies a completely separate area in most people's minds than pitch tweaking.

[1] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw

I'm assuming GP does not mean not any kind of attempt to produce nice sounding vocals. The are referring vocal tracks that don't really sound like human voices anymore, but like robot/android voices.

I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category:

- Heat Waves, Glass Animals

- Need to Know, Doja Cat

- Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber

Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.

That's because trap music (the hip-hop genre) and EDM (which has a trap subgenre) were highly influential genres in the 2010s and their influence continues to be felt, even though the latter's heyday with its huge electronic music festivals has passed. Those genres quite often intentionally used robotic vocals as an artistic choice. Simultaneously, there's been a revival of synthwave and other '80s electronic music in terms of influence and style. "Stay" somewhat typifies the latter.

When OP says “robot/android” voice I don’t think he means literal robot sounds like Kraftwerk, but instead that artificially flawless, ultra-precise, sterile “ISO-standard male(or female) vocalist” sound that seems to show up on many modern pop songs. You can’t tell the difference between modern singers today since they’ve all been produced into this single bland homogenized voice-like sound.

By robot voices I’m referring to the highly digital effects-sounding vocals in the three top singles that were mentioned.

It's interesting to me that you called out Glass Animals. To me, they are exactly the type of music that's innovative, using interesting beats, vocals, and melodies.

Even ABBA had multiple vocal tracks mixed together, with subtle phase/pitch effects done with tape, to achieve richer/fuller/sparkling sound.

Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.

My sense is that most people mean pitch correction and samples that are perfectly snapped to even intervals.

To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables.

It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough.

> People actually want this.

I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions.

Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance. You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections.

All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week.

___________

I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today.

I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by...

But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).

Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to enter the zeitgeist. Becoming a moderate success in their sub-genre is the best they can aspire to be. It is a double edged sword, every artists regresses to the mean sales afforded by a certain marketing budget.

_________________

It is not all doom and gloom. Pop music may sounds creatively bankrupt, but there is so much amazing music right under the surface.

Clipping. ,The Dear Hunter and Vulpeck are moderately successful bands that I've gotten pop listeners effortlessly hooked on, and they're all doing really creative stuff. If these bands had the sort of marketing budgets that pop artists do, then I would not be surprised if they started topping charts too. If anything, I think they would live far longer in our cultural memory than any one of the dozen milquetoast albums that are topping the charts right now.

> All pop music now feels sanitized.

What is "pop music" even? Maybe the Top 40 crowd is just always going to be a certain style for mass market audiences, and will always sound sanitized and overproduced because of production styles. But that's not all pop music.

> Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).

Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought, and even as much as I appreciated it then and I do now, I do not think they were the opposite of commercially sanitized. The production sounds as fancy and artificial as any pop band created in this era. Their sound was far more family-friendly than contemporaries such as Korn. Heck, even the original band's name was Hybrid Theory until Warner suggested they change it to be adjacent to Limp Bizkit in alphabetical order.

I think rock is being over-lionized in this discussion in general. Everyone remembers grunge fondly, less so hair metal.

> As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial".

Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music.

And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)

It's interesting that you mentioned Max Martin. I immediately thought of the new Adele single Easy on Me as a counterexample to people wanting 150-200 production tracks on a single song like you'll find on Max Martin songs. What's interesting is that Max Martin worked on the album 30 but is not listed as a producer on that song, and I think it shows. It's stripped down and you can hear the rawness, squeaks, and rasp of Adele's voice. Contrast that with something like a Max Martin produced Ariana Grande song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c) or Katy Perry, both who can sing extremely well on their own, and there's a stark difference in production taste. Something like Rihanna's (ft. Kanye West and Paul McCartney) FourFiveSeconds would be impossible for Max Martin to produce (yes it has vocal and instrumental processing and tuning on it but it is very stripped down).

Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given.

It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song.

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy...

Regarding Kanye West, I think that might just be your social bubble. I know multiple people who seem to randomly start talking about Kanye West songs totally unprompted.

And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.

I miss the old kanye.

straight from the go kanye

chop up the soul kanye

set on his goals kanye

I hate the new Kanye

the bad mood Kanye

Kayne's in the top 20 of most albums ever sold.. OP saying he basically doesn't exist because some hypothetical people hypothetically wouldn't be able to name a song is hilarious. And chalking that up to autotune?

Yeah ironically Kanye is probably one of the worst examples the guys discography is pretty amazing in terms of production and cultural significance.

Yea same, I know people like that though I personally never engaged with his music. I wonder what the decision boundary for being in each group is? I grew up listening to rap from the 80s, 90s and early 00s so it prob isn’t that.

You're talking about mainstream music, which is essentially mcdonald's and starbuck's. There are millions of other coffee shops and burger stands out there that are only serving thousands of people instead of billions.

If you think music died or is dying, you're probably just not exposing yourself to enough new music. Or you're just living in the past. Or a combination of both.

Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.

Usually when people say this, they mean mainstream music is dead or dying.

But thats a good thing.

Tale as old as time. Mainstream music has been "dying" for many decades at this point.

There's a huge amount of survivor bias when thinking about old music. All the crap that never made it far is mostly lost by now; what's remembered and what's on the 80s playlist is basically the top pick from a whole decade, readily discovered for you and sprinkled with nostalgia from your childhood.

Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.

> All the crap that never made it far is mostly lost by now;

The Monkees were more popular than the Beatles, but you'll never get the Mojo magazine audience to admit that.

Is autotune ubiquitous? Other than the trend of artists like T-Pain who used it for stylistic effect (who actually has a great natural singing voice- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc), I don't think it was ever overwhelmingly used except in certain genres such as EDM.

Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").

Yes, it's nearly ubiquitous. It usually isn't used in an OBVIOIOUS way, just to make up for less than perfect takes.

The go to software is Meloldyne. It's...crazy capable. It can even return single notes in polyphonic music.

Watch this from about the 3:00 mark on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOmTZWddrE&t=185s

(Note this video is very extreme editing, it absolutely possible (in fact easier) to use Melodyne in a way that sounds utterly natural)

Autotune the special effect a la T-Pain is not ubiquitous, but Autotune, the process, definitely is. The software itself (or its cousin, Melodyne), or the rack unit are still used in most pop music. Even bedroom studios will have it. Not using it today is pretty much a stylistic statement.

It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless.

Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.

> Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.

If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time.

But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing.

[0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.

Yeah, you’re right. it’s when you put all the things together that it makes a lot of difference.

It’s not just autotune, but also the fact people today can make almost infinite punch-ins, a lot of music is time adjusted, samplers and modern synthesizers are in perfect tuning (compared to orchestra/guitar/synths of the past).

IMO “perfect music” has its own sound, which is a good sound, but there isn’t much to go after it. Maybe the next wave will be a little looser when it comes to this.

> Is autotune ubiquitous?

Yes. What you're thinking of is "autotune" as in totally overdone, which is the signature sound people know. What the parent is referring to is autotune as in tone correction (which is, funnily enough, what the autotune software did, unless you turned it to 11). And that's everywhere; it's basically a standard part of a post-production pipeline right now. The thing is that you really can't notice it; it's just that singers hit the tone just a bit better.

And even live concerts are not safe, you can easily (and cheaply!) do that in real-time by now.

You should walk the music documentary This is Pop [0] on Netflix. It goes into a lot more details about the inventor and the history of Autotune.

In summary, it was used a lot longer (like old Mac 68k days) by a lot more artists than you realize. T-Pain turned an aid for lackluster artists into a form of art all its own. And the industry was pissed.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/81050786

What you think of as Autotune from your examples was popularized by Cher (turning it up all the way to produce that effect).

Used sparingly it can turn people with terrible pitch into reasonably good singers. Turned up a bit more gets you a pristine sound, which sometimes pops pleasantly but often enough ends up bland and less memorable. You may have to have an ear for music a bit to notice it.

Once you notice it, it is everywhere.

Fair point, but it still depends. Even inhumanly perfect sterile vocals can be offset by interesting instrumentals and innovative production. Really depends on what genre, or even what specific song, we're talking about. There is a lot of overproduced vapid pop (to pick a genre that might use this to a higher extent), but there is also a lot of interesting pop.

I can't disagree here about some really good music using Autotune. Even if it is not your cup of tea, Cher's "Believe" is undeniably iconic.

I am not a record producer, but I feel like Autotune is a big part of the reason that we don't have many modern classics. I would love some producers' hot takes on this article.

Some degree of vocal tuning is probably ubiquitous, but the extreme T-Pain/Cher effect is definitely not ubiquitous or even that common anymore.

Who are the biggest artists today? Off the top of my head: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Billie Eilish, all of them use pretty much natural-sounding vocals.

And the big artists that use Autotune and vocal effects like The Weeknd, Kid Laroi, and Post Malone don't do it to the same degree. Their voices certainly retain some unique character

And to add to your last point, I’d say those three vocalists you mention are using those effects for stylistic purposes and not (just) to cover up human-sounding flaws for the sake of overproduction.

This only applies if you somehow are only exposed to music that is played on the radio. The same type of people who don't connect with current popular music probably didn't connect with previous popular music. Many people largely disengage with seeking out music once they enter adulthood, if they even did to any meaningful degree at all. They might still listen to music they liked when they were younger regularly, but they aren't going out of their way to discover it.

My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.

Your perception of Kanye only being famous "because his wife is famous" is something that is influenced by your own media consumption. I'm not sure if you actually asked people that they would struggle - Kanye has been big for a long time. I think if people struggled to know the names of the songs it would probably just be because Kanye isn't radio friendly.

The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.

Kanye West is one of the most listened to artists in the last two decades, and is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the last two decades.

If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.

> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle

I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.

I'm with you on autotune. It's an effect that was briefly musically interesting and then almost immediately massively overused. I can't stand the sound of it now.

I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it.

We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.

This feels like the same argument you'd here when electric guitars became ubiquitis. Or synthasizers.

Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.

I agree that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with autotune, but electric guitars and synthesizers were very expressive instruments that generated new possibilities for musicians to express themselves: guitars with more sustain allowing for legato playing, for a different kind of vibrato, synthesizers allowing change of different parameters that traditional instruments can’t, etc. “Autotune the T-Pain effect”, is also a new sound…

But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression.

Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.

That’s an interesting idea, but I believe your right that much modern music have the problem that it all sounds similar. Once in a while some artist stands out, but so much modern R&B, pop and rock is so simular that you can switch songs between artists and no one would know.

It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.

> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."

Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys.

Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant.

He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.

> When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is

As opposed to the 1960s, when nearly every popular album was actually recorded by the Wrecking Crew, not whatever muppets happened to be on the cover.

There was a great post on Reddit about this a couple of days ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/s6l9tk...

Not about autotune per se but about what makes a great singer is not the perfection of their voice but the imperfections, that make it recognizable.

Autotune irons out imperfections; so does the grid. A big problem of new music is it's too perfect, which makes it sound dead.

What autotune did to music, filters in smartphones photo apps did to photographs.

Photos of people now show a perfect, clear, soulless and uncanny skin. It is the same thing when I hear autotuned artists.

Do you think that Beethoven would feel the same way about rock and roll, or 1900s folk feel the same way about vinyl killing sheet music and so on through the history of music.

I don't think I listen to anything that's autotuned. But I also don't think music is dying, so there's that.

“Autotuned” doesn’t necessarily mean the T-Pain effect, it can be used in a quasi-imperceptible way. Most mainstream music today uses it.

Whether GP’s thesis has merit, I have no idea.

I once heard a saying, "the future of music is not music." All through history, most recently with Autotune and previously with rap music (and further back in other ways), we hear people saying, "that's not music!" Invariably, these styles establish themselves and time moves on. I mean, if you want to talk about antipathy and outright-racist music criticism and hatred being thoroughly demolished, let us look at how rap has taken over Country music, because it has. 30 years ago half of everybody didn't consider rap to be music. Do you remember people saying "(c)rap" or "hippity-hop?" It wasn't that long ago!

You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love?

>Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.

It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist.

>it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)

That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste.

My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

A coworker 10 years my senior when I was 20: When did MTV start sucking and VH1 get good? MTV used to be good and VH1 used to be for the boring older crowd. It's way better than MTV, now.

Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed.

::pregnant pause::

Him: Ouch... My youth.

> they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music

To be fair, "Old Town Road" is sort of both.

I think that is part of it, also the way that mass-market music is mixed today. It's very loud all the time and has no dynamic range. This has been a problem for a while TBH but it certainly isn't better in 2022. It all combines to make a very artificial sound.

There exists a lot of music outside a few extremely popular names you mention. Far, far from dead.

There's a reason why DAWs usually have a "humanizer" knob. Turns out humans relate better to imperfect things that feel like were created by other humans than they do to overly perfect things obviously created by machines.

But those imperfections are incorrect as opposed to correct variations

No, it's about tiny and usually unnoticeable delays in hitting a note or a beat. There's nothing incorrect about them. They are not variations either, just tiny mistakes that happen to _all_ humans when they play an instrument.

The assumption that these variations are mistakes is the incorrect one.

There is even research showing the variations in timing follow large macro cycles.

None of this is random or mistakes when we are talking about high level players.

Some is deliberate. Some is totally unconscious.

But not mistakes.

Gold digger was an amazing song when it came out. After that I would struggle to name one. I know that the Ye is talented and influential, I just don't think as much as some people make out.

Autotune is just one of many tools that were used to (IMO) overproduce music in the early '00s. I think DAWs in general give producers enough rope to strangle the life out of any recording.

You don't think people on the street could name "Golddigger"? It was in the first episode of "Glee" for Pete's sake. I think you'd have more luck getting people to name a Kanye West song than whole lot of other artists.

It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.

I know Golddigger but couldn't have told you who it was by.

> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.

I am highly skeptical of this assertion.

I only know the one where he talked over the top of a Daft Punk track. I already had the CD with the Daft Punk track which was really the same song so I just kept that one.

I am highly skeptical that if you stopped a random person on the street that they would be able to identify who Kanye West is.

I doubt the person who could not identify Kanye West could also identify nearly any other musician. Do you think they'd be able to identify John Lennon?

I have no idea. The scope of music seems so fragmented today. It's so big now.

People can burrow into a specific small set of bands and music styles and never ever need to move outside of it now.

It's seems quaint that 20 years ago my primary source of new music was SNL and late shows.

Now, spotify/pandora will give you entry to exactly what you want and keep giving it to you, forver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com