autotune

or, my heart trembles on the robotic vocal chords no one ever wanted to hear; or, give up your voice and haunt me with corroding melodies

I cannot get enough of this massive version of Kanye West’s Runaway¹. But where it really hits me differently is around the 10 minute mark when it transitions to a live autotuned² freestyle. And then around the 18 minute mark when it becomes just this sloshing reverb down my spine, radiating out to my fingers, my toes. Then again near the 22 minute mark when the voice finds firm ground again and begs me to break.

I love autotune.

No, let me rephrase that: I have always loved autotune.

Netflix made an hour long documentary about autotune that I watched a few months ago³. It’s interesting, but it was never exactly what I wanted it to be. I think even as a history of vocal processors, it’s both too little and too wide. It largely focuses on T-Pain, which makes sense but also limits it quite a bit.

I will not be talking about T-Pain⁴.

Don’t remember when I first encountered autotune. Probably, like everyone else, it was Cher. But I think when it first began to get inside my skull was with Daft Punk.

Revelation.

That’s what One More Time was for me when I first caught the music video on MTV at 2am when I was twelve years old. I knew what anime was, had watched enough Pokemon to not be thrown by the style of animation here, but, all the same, the video launched me into the stratosphere even as I sank deeper and deeper into the massive leather chair set in front of our TV. I remember holding my breath when the song slows, sinking deeper into the chair, into the bones of the earth beneath me to melt in the blackheart of this planet, and then the beat spikes and I hadn’t blinked in minutes, pulling my heart higher and higher even as my body kept sinking impossibly deeper and I heard the music like vibrations in my bones rather than waves in the air and my heart kept rising above my sinking body to watch me watching, listening, becoming two people—the observer and the feeler—who would not combine again until one terrible night a decade later watching Marianela Nunez teach me how to live one pirouette at a time.

I’ve had an obsession with deformation⁵, with corrosion, with the transience of all things, the way time breaks and remakes us. The way we will do anything to unshackle ourselves from our stupid bodies, from our idiot brains.

When I hear autotune, I hear so much more than processing. I hear an apocalypse, a desolate future, a beautiful calamity, and my own heart growing large enough to break in half, to shatter to pieces because of the way a voice became many, became other than itself to itself, to me, to all of us showered by the layering ghosts of a voice haunting itself.

I’ve been in love with Johnny Greenwood’s guitar since the first moment I heard it. My favorite guitars are the ones that sound nothing like a guitar, and I’ve never been able to articulate why⁶, but something similar happens to me when voices⁷ twist and deform and become other, throwing out sounds hauntingly inhuman in a way that feels so completely and utterly and heartbreakingly human that I sometimes gasp at the way these sounds claw inside my lungs.

Autotune speaks to me in ways a naked and raw voice just can’t, and I think there’s probably something philosophical to say about this for someone smarter than me, but I find this deformation of the human voice almost religious, the way it continually awes me, the way we find our own mortality, our blood and bones and skin so insubstantial, so insufficient, that we try to other ourselves, break free from the shackles of meat and liquid, even if it means we must transfigure our lives, digitize our images, our voices, in order to finally say something true, say something lasting and beautiful, become who we long to be, who we always dreamt we could be. We’ve created so many technologies to redeploy and reconfigure our voices, faces, bodies, our very lives, and we focus so often exclusively on the disastrous elements⁸ that go hand in hand with these that we never interrogate why it took Kanye West’s scraped raw vocals trembling even through the autotune to break my heart in an entirely new way, a way I didn’t even know my heart could be broken.

The universality of longing for connection, for understanding never ceases to punch me in the chest, leave me blinking back tears, and when I hear autotune this is what I hear. It’s not a mask for talentless voices that can’t sing, but a tool to use a voice as an instrument to make you feel something that can’t be felt with meat and bones, with blood and words. We corrupt and corrode and deform and rip apart our voices to finally say something so deep inside us that we cannot express it nakedly, without the artifice, the cloak of a digitized transubstantiated version of ourselves.

We live cyberpunk lives in a cyberpunk world and to be alive now is to engage with the world as it actually is, rather than how we wished it was, rather than long for the past that never was. For me, I find autotune an undeniably beautiful tool to convey the unnamable emotions that arise in humanity during this cyberpunked existential crisis, this slowmoving species suicide we trapped ourselves inside.

Give me love. Give me life. Give me release.

Haunt me—forever haunt me—as the ghosts of my own howl echoing in an empty room.

Wolf.

Howl.

1. I mentioned on instagram that I’ve written a big essay about Kanye West. I’ve decided to send that out to a few places to see if I can get it published elsewhere. I’ve even contacted a publisher about turning it into an entire book, which is honestly something I never thought I’d be talking about doing. Especially since the essay is only about one song. If it becomes a book, it will still only be about one song. If no one bites on it, I’ll publish it here. Along with my forthcoming Final Fantasy VI essay, I think it’s one of the best essays I’ve ever written. I mean, maybe that’s not saying much since I’m not exactly known for this. But I’m very proud of what I’ve managed with these two specific essays. It’s possibly even something new.

2. Before someone who knows about music production comes to correct me about something: I don’t know exactly what autotune is. I’m sure some of what I’m going to talk about here is done with some other kind of vocal modulator software, but to me it’s all one. I mean, feel free to correct me, but my point stands, whether everything I discuss here is specifically autotune or some other similar vocal processor.

3. Might write something about a different documentary in that same series. We’ll see if I have enough to say about Country music. Probably I don’t, but you never know.

4. He seems cool.

5. Maybe one day I’ll write about the hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and how it gave me a path through some strange days.

6. Maybe I’ll write about my hatred for the way guitars sound another day. Most people find this odd enough that it’s probably worth explaining or at least examining.

7. I could write a whole book on Bjork’s Medulla, now that I think about it.

8. Don’t let anyone you know use social media.