What the History of Autotune Tells Us About the Future of AI
There Are No Girls on the Internet
iHeartPodcasts
4.1 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
It's the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and that’s a great opportunity for Bridget to dig into one of her favorite subjects to nerd out about: trends in audio. In this episode, she breaks down the history of auto-tune. Today it’s incredibly common, but when musicians first started using it there was a huge backlash. Prominent musicians said it was ruining music, and Time Magazine put it on their list of “50 Worst Inventions.” Yet artists like T-Pain and Cher used it to create new sounds that listeners loved, and today it is widely accepted as a valuable tool for legitimate artists to use for making music. The disruptive history of auto-tune, originally derided as a toy before innovators embraced it to create something new, offers lessons for how we should understand AI in 2023.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 0:17.4 | It is the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and that is a great opportunity to dig into one of my |
| 0:22.5 | favorite subjects to nerd out about, which is audio and kind of trends in audio, how we respond |
| 0:28.9 | to those trends and what it says about us as a culture. The history of autotune is a fascinating one, |
| 0:34.2 | and I think it really explains why I'm so hung up on audio trends as like a nerdy little |
| 0:38.9 | side interest. So when I say auto tune, Mike, what comes to mind for you? Was there any one person |
| 0:45.1 | that comes to mind when you think about autotune? Yeah, I mean, I'm no autotune expert, but I think |
| 0:50.7 | T-Pain really is the artist who took it and ran with it and made it like his thing. |
| 0:59.4 | Yes, great answer. |
| 1:00.9 | I recently watched the T-Pain NPR Tiny Desk concert, which is like a masterpiece. |
| 1:06.5 | People should definitely watch it. |
| 1:07.6 | But it kind of made me happy to see T-Pain kind of coming full circle |
| 1:14.1 | and kind of getting the flowers that he so richly deserves for being an innovator when it |
| 1:19.8 | comes to Autotune. And the history of how Autotune went from this like kind of niche thing to |
| 1:26.5 | being everywhere, to being hated, to now being |
| 1:29.3 | like commonplace, I think is such an interesting one. And the reason that I want to tell this |
| 1:33.7 | story now, in addition to being the 50th anniversary of hip hop, is that I think the conversation |
| 1:39.2 | that we're having around technology and how it intersects with art and creativity really mirrors the conversation |
| 1:46.3 | that we had around autotune. I'm specifically thinking here about conversations around AI. |
| 1:51.0 | You know, how will AI shape things like hip-hop is a question that we are seeing artists grapple |
| 1:56.4 | with in real time. And I think that's kind of because hip-hop has always had this particular unique |
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