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Comment by shawnc | Hacker News Reader

Great point. It's fascinating that the trend of the pop music industry has been towards more and more electronic control over vocals and instruments and everything else for a very long time... and now that AI can basically replicate it, and with all the auto-tune that we got used to, we can barely tell if it's 'real' or AI-generated.

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I don't think this is accurate -- overt autotune in pop music peaked in the 00's, and has really not been as influential in the pop trends of the last decade or two.

Many of the most popular artists today lean away from heavy electronic control, and go for a more acoustic/natural sound.

I think that the AI vocals becoming indistinguishable from the real thing has more to do with the quality of the AI, and less to do with modern pop music sounding robotic.

Name a singpe pop tune without pitch correction in the last 20 years. A few exist, but go look. It will be enlightening, and perhaps disheartening.

Autotune and pitch correction are not the same thing. The majority of recent pop songs don't have a noticeable electronic vocal control in the way that the parent comment is describing.

The autotuned vocal style generally peaked in popularity a couple decades ago, and is much less common now (with many of the current top pop artists opting for more organic vocals).

It's almost like the capital/distribution forces of mass market media have been striving to devalue the human components of the art...

... but I can't imagine why that'd be attractive to them.

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