Comment by pkaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkaler | Hacker News Reader

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When referring to Kanye West, I'm assuming you mean 808s and Heartbreaks. Auto-Tune was used as an instrument on that album. That's what the original article alludes too. The vocals are supposed to contrast with the super, lofi, YouTubeyness of the background music.

This completely the opposite of Kanye West's past work all the way back to Jay-Z's Blueprint album.

One big critique of Auto-Tune is that it kills emotion by making pitch too perfect.

You can't say this about 808s and Heartbreaks. The album sounds like nails on a chalkboard. And it's supposed to. The album was created in the context of him breaking up with his fiance and his mother dying.

You can call Kanye West a lot of things, but disingenuous is not one of them. The use of Auto-Tune wasn't meant to be disingenuous in this one particular case.

(I can't believe I just deconstructed a Kanye West album on Hacker News.)

Ok, fair enough. Every Kanye West song I've heard recently.

It's an interesting sound, it's just overused recently. There's basically two ways to use Auto-Tune: the intended way, cleaning up the pitch of vocals; and as a deliberate distortion effect, a la T-Pain / Kanye's recent songs. The latter produces a very distinct sound that gets old, fast.

The 'deliberate distortion effect,' that's apparently not the intended way to use Auto-Tune, has been used as a vocal effect for decades now, not specifically with Auto-Tune but with instruments like the TokBox and vocoders.

Thing is, people say it gets old because they think that all voices filtered through Auto-Tune sound the same, but that's not true. Kanye's voice through Auto-Tune sounds a lot different than T-Pain's, and you have to be talented to make it sound good. Can it be a cheesy effect? Absolutely. But if tuned correctly, can really add a cold, robotic color to a track.

Personally, I love it. Kanye uses differently than T-Pain and they are very distinct styles I enjoy.

It's a damn fun thing to play around with, too. :P

T-Pain abuses it on every song he has. Kanye, personality issues aside, used it quite well for a change from his normal style of music. He's not the _worst_ culprit of using Auto-Tune and ruining music.

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