While the roots of the Western music industry are dodgy, it seems only the tip of the iceberg. Music's weaponization is omnipresent, especially in public locations and mainstream media. You don't need to be a baby boomer to be estranged by the most recent fad: Autotuned vocals.
Autotune is one of the many programs that "correct" pitch, which means it forces vowels up or down in frequency to conform to a set target pitch. The software has gotten incredibly advanced over the past decades, and is now widely available to any bedroom music producer. It has sparked countless creative music projects that utilize these algorhythms to make songs out of material which was once a speech or lecture. With the help of AI Klaus Schwab was one of the more recent targets, and the results are just wonderful!
It wasn't long ago that software like autotune was frowned upon by pretty much everyone. A gimmick to help talentless singers get signed to major labels, substituting competency for elaborate processes in the music studio tweaking and "fixing" off-key vocals. Some made a point of publicly rejecting autotune in their work, and it became sort of a benchmark for artistic merit to stand by the "handmade music" theme and avoid these artificial crutches to sing well. We can still hear the competency of singers who had to record their greatest successes using their natural skills alone, and a lot of hard work. Michael Jackson comes to mind, as well as Freddie Mercury and countless others.
To be fair, pitch-correction software like Autotone or Melodyne can bring strong advantages to music production, much like salt does in the kitchen. A little in the right situation can be of great benefit, especially in areas where we are not dealing with the human voice alone but with artificial sounds. Software like this can make those abstract sounds fit songs better and create more tonal intrigue in a piece of music.
But, the intertwining with what a human voice naturally does and doesn't do, the way it is employed recklessly today, and the severity with which it is forced on the consciousness of the public is frankly an affront and an attack on the human spirit.
So how did this trend on vocal manipulation get introduced?
In my perception, the first waves of the characteristic sound of pitch-correcting software made palatable to the masses arose around the 90's, the foreshadowing of the fads and trends that now have been cemented into normality status for the young generations of today. If you are older than 35 you will remember the first stabs at trying to normalize and promote this new "way" of manipulating the human voice for mainstream hits. Cher and Eiffel65, god! At the risk of giving you a spiritually fatal earworm (a song stuck in your head), you may choose or reject to refresh your memory:
One-hit wonders came and went and as the years went by autotune and software like it have taken the center stage, with their characteristic pitch glides between dead-on notes of the common scales. Often their use is "still" limited to the chorus of a song, so as to not drive everyone insane instantly, but they do follow a fixed pattern, a way of production, as if a whole... gang were working on it across most popular genres and in any language.
Autotune-chorus rap was absolutely huge in Albania the past years. We come to Italy, we hear the same style in Italian. It is omnipresent in English language space pop music, and most rap I ever get to hear these days, even in Germany, by cars driving by or being on a public radio is full of it. It's a nuisance!
But is it just a matter of taste?
Dehumanization in progress
The issue with this outright abuse of pitch correcting software is that it makes huamn beings sound monotonous and unnatural. Mix-up-able. Even dudes from different countries sound identical in tonality. It is near impossible to discern the quality of tonality and timbre from a human voice pressed through a pitch-correcting algorhythm with drastic settings and so it's a lot copy and paste in the business as usual. Only now the bar has been lowered considerably as compared to a few decades ago. Young producers are mimicking these trends to pander to the artificial Zeitgeist of our era.
Tonal variety has been crushed by this, all dudes on the mic are interchangeable and their names don't mean anything any longer. The same with women: autotune their voices and they all sound like the same chick, you can only discern them by their costumes. You start to wonder how this one singer is fluent in so many languages until you remind yourself they are all processed the same way in the studio.
What's more, we find that this trend has long started to blur the line between male and female altogether. When dead-on pitch correction with hard jumps and the electronic octaving of human voices become the norm, ALL singers start to sound alike. Male, female, doesn't matter. And how convenient for a system that keeps telling people there are more than two genders. Well of course man, it is evident in music!
And of course, as vowels are forced to a fixed pitch we lose the timbre, the emotive expressiveness of how the phrase was delivered. The subtlest nuances of a voice are being painted over by dead-on pitch correction that doesn't move and doesn't breathe.
This all serves to further decouple us from nature, as if that were even possible. An industry aimed at listeners in their first decade of life will leave a mark longterm, count on it!
Not only does this trend blur all natural lines, it also programs the masses to embrace the digital age, cyberspace and AI, to solidify trust in technology devoid of soul and heart. Materialism at its finest. An age where reason dominates will produce machines that are driven solely by reason. The problem is, reason is dependent on its underlying assumptions. Assumptions that - on inspection - are not reasonable at all but instead based on faith alone, on the indoctrination of the same system that touts to be at the forefront of logic and reasonableness. It is anything but. It's a trap and a lie and AI will not help you figure it out because it was programmed to fortify our fake beliefs rather than helping us see through them.
And so, now that talk of technological unemployment has finally reached the masses and people snuggle with "AI assistants" of the gang's company behemoths like Amazon, Apple and Google, this trend in music does serve the purpose of training us to adopt this change gradually. Make it "normal". And the industry has been working towards it for decades now.
Once it is claimed that robot voices are superior to humans', when art is no longer painted by hands and poems no longer written by lovers of the word, humanity will be in a hole so deep, it seems unimaginable to find our way out again. We still may, with our experience of a different era... but our grandkids would do well to hear the story from before all this madness ensued; a story from the time when the quality of art was about to get diminished, the liberty of the individual curtailed and the free spirit of musicians and artists undermined.
So is this "the real conspiracy" in music then? Maybe so, but probably not. There is more! But for that we must dig deeper, to realize what music actually is and how it relates to us physically, mentally and emotionally. More on that in the next part of this series!