Since 2005, Auto-Tune has taken the pop music industry by storm. It is estimated that roughly 90% of pop songs today incorporate some type of voice modulation technology (Clayton, 26).
In just a couple of decades, Auto-Tune managed to become one of the most predictable aspects of recorded music. In an interview with NPR that was conducted in November of 2014, T-Pain had the following to say about the sudden popularity of Auto-Tune: “People started doing what I did. I didn’t tell anybody to use Auto-Tune. I didn’t ask anybody to use Auto-Tune. This is my style” (Najm, 1). There was a brief period in between the final months of 2005 and the early months of 2007 when few artists were using Auto-Tune due to the backlash that T-Pain received in the media. However, major label artists such as Beyonce, Kanye West, and Taylor Swift began using Auto-Tune to smooth over their vocals in 2008 (Sloan, 84, 165).
The aforementioned artists obviously combined their own unique musical touches to the Auto-Tune technology. However, T-Pain points out that everything Auto-Tune related flowed through him in the period following T-Pain’s immediate backlash.
“Any time somebody wanted Auto-Tune, they called T-Pain. But people felt like they could do it on their own. So it didn’t make me feel too bad because I’ve always been taught that the originator of anything is gonna get hated the most because everyone thinks they can do it better. And they never can” (Najm, 1).
The majority of the music industry even considered T-Pain to be the “creator” of Auto-Tune itself. The release of Kanye West’s album, 808s and Heartbreak, indicated that the Auto-Tune aesthetic was not a passing trend, as the album incorporated Auto-Tune in almost all of the tracks. However, it is worth noting that other artists did not use Auto-Tune to the same extent and in the same manner that T-Pain did. For example, in his song “Heartless” which is part of 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye West uses Auto-Tune throughout the whole song, but only uses the robotic vocal style in the chorus. T-Pain, on the other hand, used Auto-Tune in all of his songs for the main purpose of the robotic sound.
