The quoted section of the article is pretty out of touch with modern music. Many (most?) genres of EDM place the importance of timbre and texture above harmony and melody
> Timbre is even more crucial in contemporary genres such as electronic dance music and rap. EDM, said Swoger-Ruston, is really “experimentation with timbre.” The widespread use of sampling means the sample, not the note, is increasingly the basic unit of music.
But that aside, this take reeks of sampling bias. Every amateur with a laptop uploads their music to SoundCloud/Youtube/whatever even while they are still learning. You probably don’t have much exposure to the crappy piano fugues and poorly orchestrated droning sonatas that are written by early university students. Trust me there’s a lot of that as well. Everyone starts somewhere after all.
I didn't assert this.
That's a pretty harsh objective take for a highly subjective topic.
A lot of people like it - myself included. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not valid.
EDM at least has to be considered, and likely, no matter how crap it is, someone put some sort of effort into it. Speaking into a pitch bender takes nothing but breath, and I'm stuck listening to this garbage in traffic every day.
Also moving back to one of the most well known autotune users T-Pain is a great singer without the technology. It's obvious there's more to it then just auto-aim function.
Some people use it that way, but it doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally limited to that scope.