The Surprisingly Long History of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Processing Technology Music Critics Love to Hate

In the fall of 1998, pop music changed forever — or at least it seems that way today, a quarter-century later. The epochal event in question was the release of Cher’s comeback hit “Believe,” of whose jaggedly fractured vocal glissando no listener had heard the likes of before. “The glow-and-flutter of Cher’s voice at key points in the song announced its own technological artifice,” writes critic Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork, “a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal for the vague religiosity of the chorus.” As for how that effect had been achieved, only the tech-savviest studio professionals would have suspected a creative misuse of Auto-Tune, a popular digital audio processing tool brought to market the year before.

As its name suggests, Auto-Tune was designed to keep a musical performance in tune automatically. This capability owes to the efforts of one Andy Hildebrand, a classical flute virtuoso turned oil-extraction engineer turned music-technology entrepreneur. Employing the same mathematical acumen he’d used to assist the likes of Exxon in determining the location of prime drilling sites from processed sonar data, he figured out a vast simplification of the calculations theoretically required for an algorithm to put a real vocal recording into a particular key.

Rapidly adopted throughout the music industry, Hildebrand’s invention soon became a generic trademark, like Kleenex, Jell-O, or Google. Even if a studio wasn’t using Auto-Tune, it was almost certainly auto-tuning, and with such subtlety that listeners never noticed.

The producers of “Believe,” for their part, turned the subtlety (or, technically, the “smoothness”) down to zero. In an attempt to keep that discovery a secret, they claimed at first to have used a vocoder, a synthesizer that converts the human voice into manipulable analog or digital signals. Some would also have suspected the even more venerable talkbox, which had been made well-known in the seventies and eighties by Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, and Roger Troutman of Zapp. Though the “Cher effect,” as it was known for a time, could plausibly be regarded as an aesthetic descendant of those devices, it had an entirely different technological basis. A few years after that basis became widely understood, conspicuous Auto-Tune became ubiquitous, not just in dance music but also in hip-hop, whose artists (not least Rappa Ternt Sanga T-Pain) used Auto-Tune to steer their genre straight into the currents of mainstream pop, if not always to high critical acclaim.

Used as intended, Auto-Tune constituted a godsend for music producers working with any singer less freakishly skilled than, say, Freddie Mercury. Producer-Youtuber Rick Beato admits as much in the video just above, though given his classic rock- and jazz-oriented tastes, it doesn’t come as a surprise also to hear him lament the technology’s overuse. But for those willing to take it to ever-further extremes, Auto-Tune has given rise to previously unimagined subgenres, bringing (as emphasized in a recent Arte documentary) the universal language of melody into the linguistically fragmented arena of global hip-hop. As a means of generating “digital soul, for digital beings, leading digital lives,” in Reynolds’ words, Auto-Tune does reflect our time, for better or for worse. Its detractors can at least take some consolation in the fact that recent releases have come with something called a “humanize knob.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Generative AI for Everyone: A Free Course from AI Pioneer Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng–an AI pioneer and Stanford computer science professor–has released a new course called Generative AI for Everyone. Designed for a non-technical audience, the course will “guide you through how generative AI works and what it can (and can’t) do. It includes hands-on exercises where you’ll learn to use generative AI to help in day-to-day work.”  The course also explains “how to think through the lifecycle of a generative AI project, from conception to launch, including how to build effective prompts,” and it discusses “the potential opportunities and risks that generative AI technologies present to individuals, businesses, and society.” Given the coming prevalence of AI, it’s worth spending six hours with this course (the estimated time needed to complete it). You can audit Generative AI for Everyone for free, and watch all of the lectures at no cost. If you would like to take the course and earn a certificate, it will cost $49.

Generative AI for Everyone will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Discover the Mikiphone, the World’s First Portable Record Player: “Fits a Jacket Pocket; Goes into a Lady’s Handbag” (1924)

The iPod shuffle recently enjoyed a bit of a comeback on TikTok.

Can the Mikiphone be far behind?

The invention of siblings Miklós and Étienne Vadász, the world’s first pocket record player caused a stir when it was introduced a century ago, nabbing first prize at an international music exhibition and finding favor with modernist architect Le Corbusier, who hailed it for embodying the “essence of the esprit nouveau.”

Unlike more recent portable audio innovations, some assembly was required.

It’s fair to assume that the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound staffer deftly unpacking antique Mikiphone components from its cunning Sony Discman-sized case, above, has more practice putting the thing together than a nervous young fella eager to woo his gal al fresco with his just purchased, cutting edge 1924 technology.

A period advertisement extols the Mikiphone’s portability …

Fits in a jacket pocket

Goes in a lady’s handbag

Will hang on a cycle frame

Goes in a car door pocket

Ideal for picnics, car jaunts, river trips

…but fails to mention that in order to enjoy it, you’d also have to schlep along a fair amount of 78 RPM records, whose 10-inch diameters aren’t nearly so pocket and purse-compatible.

Maison Paillard produced approximately 180,000 of these hand-cranked wonders over the course of three years. When sales dropped in 1927, the remaining stock was sold off at a discount or given away to contest winners.

These days, an authentic Mikphone can fetch $500 and upward at auction. (Beware of Mikiphonies!)

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

 

 

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stirring Letter About ChatGPT and Human Creativity: “We Are Fighting for the Very Soul of the World”

Observers have expressed a variety of reactions to the organizational drama unfolding even now at OpenAI, the non-profit behind the enormously popular ChatGPT. Some have already written speculative laments in case of OpenAI’s total dissolution, mourning the great strides in artificial intelligence that would thus be forsaken. It’s safe to say that Nick Cave will not do the same: having used his newsletter The Red Hand Files to cast doubt on AI’s ability to write a great song — and to condemn a set of ChatGPT-generated lyrics in his own style — he more recently told a fan exactly “what’s wrong with making things faster and easier” through AI.

“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavors animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning,” Cave writes. “It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.”

In “fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanizing the imagination,” it works toward eliminating “the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself.” But the creative impulse “must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil,” we should fight the forces set against it “tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

These are strong words, and they sound even stronger when read aloud in the Letters Live video above by Stephen Fry. One may sense a certain irony here, given Fry’s well-known technophilia, but he and Cave have made common cause before, whether calling for government support of the arts or turning up for the coronation of King Charles III. “Fry refers to Cave’s Murder Ballads album in his book The Ode Less Travelled,” adds one Youtube commenter, “while Fry is rumored to be the person with ‘an enormous and encyclopedic brain’ in Cave’s song ‘We Call Upon the Author.'” ChatGPT could well be described as encyclopedic, but in no ordinary sense does it have a brain — the very thing of which authors are now called upon to make the fullest possible use.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Making of the Last Beatles Song, “Now and Then”: A Short Film

During the pandemic, Peter Jackson’s documentary, Get Back, used cutting-edge software to restore footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be recording sessions. If you watched the film, you know it was magic. Now, his technology offers us another gift–the final Beatles song.

As the short film explains above, the making of the song, “Now and Then,” began in 1995, when Paul, George and Ringo started working with a demo recorded by John Lennon during the 1970s. The project eventually stalled out when the trio couldn’t pristinely extract Lennon’s vocals. Then George Harrison died, and another two decades slipped by. Last year, Jackson’s software salvaged the project, allowing the Beatles to capture the elusive Lennon vocal and complete their final song. “Now and Then” is set to be released on November 3, accompanied by a music video created by Jackson himself. Stay tuned for that.

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Leonardo da Vinci Created the Design for the Miter Lock, Which Is Still Used in the Panama and Suez Canals

“A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Panama”: we all know the piece of infrastructure to which this famous palindrome refers. But who, exactly, is the man? Some might imagine President Theodore Roosevelt in the role, given his oversight of the project’s acquisition by the United States of America. But it’s more commonly thought to be George W. Goethals, the Roosevelt-appointed chief engineer who brought it to completion two years early. Then again, one could also make the case for French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who originally conceived of not only the Panama Canal but also the Suez Canal. And as long as we’re reaching back in history, how does Leonardo da Vinci strike you?

True, Leonardo died roughly four centuries before the Panama Canal broke ground. But that its mechanism works at all owes to one of his many inventions: the miter lock, documented in one of his notebooks from 1497. The design, as explained in the Lesics video above, involves “two V-shaped wooden gates” attached with hinges to the sides of a river.

Given their shape, the water flowing through the river naturally forces the gates to close, one side forming a neat joint with the other. Inside, “as the water level rises, the pressure on the gate increases,” which seals it even more tightly. To facilitate re-opening the “perfect watertight lock” thus formed, Leonardo also specified a set of sluice valves in the gates that can be opened to even out the water levels again.

The twentieth-century builders of the Panama Canal benefited from technologies unavailable in Leonardo’s time: powerful motors, for instance, that could open and close the gates more efficiently than human muscle. And though it has undergone improvements over the past century (such as the replacement of the geared system attached to those motors with even more effective hydraulic cylinders), its structure and operation remain visibly derived from Leonardo’s elegant miter lock, as do those of the Suez Canal. About 80 ships pass through those two famous waterways each and every day, and ships of a size scarcely imaginable in the fifteenth century at that: not bad for a couple pieces of 500-year-old engineering.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Researchers Use AI to Decode the First Word on an Ancient Scroll Burned by Vesuvius

In the year 79, AD Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying both Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1750, an Italian farmworker discovered an entombed seaside villa in Herculaneum while digging a well. When excavated, the residence yielded hundreds of scrolls, all of them turned into what looked and felt like lumps of ash, and practically all of them unrollable, let alone readable. Only in 2015 did humankind — or more specifically, University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales and his team — develop the technology that could let us see what texts these ancient scrolls contain. Eventually, a particle accelerator and machine learning came into play. This timeline comes from the web site of the Vesuvius Challenge, “a machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum Papyri.”

Funded by technology entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, the Vesuvius Challenge has given out $260,000 of its $1 million of prizes so far, including $40,000 to undergraduate student/engineer Luke Farritor, who identified ten letters in a section of one scroll, and $10,000 to biorobotics graduate student Youssef Nader, who subsequently and independently discovered those same letters.

The word they form? Porphyras, ancient Greek for “purple”: a color, incidentally, that signified wealth and power in the ancient world, not least because of the enormous amount of labor required to extract it from nature. That the Herculaneum Papyri have started to become readable also represents the culmination of a similarly impressive effort, albeit one based on technological development rather than the extraction of sea-snail glands.

As Nicholas Wade writes in the New York Times, the current method “uses computer tomography, the same technique as in CT scans” — executed with the aforementioned particle accelerator — “plus advancements in artificial intelligence” used “to help distinguish ink from papyrus.” You can learn more about the Vesuvius Challenge in the video above. Its creator Garrett Ryan, of ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, has been previously featured here on Open Culture for his explanation of how 99 percent of ancient texts were lost — which means these charred scrolls could hold a great deal of knowledge about the ancient world. Do they contain, as Ryan fantasizes, the lost books of Livy, the dialogues of Aristotle, poems by Sappho? We’ll only know when someone figures out how best to use technology to decode them all. Artificial intelligence may be the key to the future, as we’ve often heard in recent years, but in this particular case, it offers a promising key to the past.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Coffee Can Make Concrete 30% Stronger, a New Study Finds

The Romans fashioned their buildings with concrete that has endured for 2,000 years. Their secret? Some researchers think it’s how the Romans heated lime. Others think it’s how they used pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash. Nowhere does coffee figure into the equation. Too bad.

Happily, researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University have discovered that “concrete can be made 30% stronger by replacing a percentage of sand with spent coffee grounds, an organic waste product produced in huge amounts that usually ends up in landfills,” writes New Atlas. Rajeev Roychand (above), the lead author of a study in the Journal of Cleaner Production, notes: “The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gasses including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change. The inspiration for our work was to find an innovative way of using the large amounts of coffee waste in construction projects rather than going to landfills—to give coffee a ‘double shot’ at life.” If Roychand’s research findings endure, archaeologists and materials engineers might enjoy puzzling over the mysteries of coffee and concrete another two millennia from now.

You can read his study, “Transforming spent coffee grounds into a valuable resource for the enhancement of concrete strength” here.

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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