Auto-Tune’s presence is throughout music – with every genre containing artists that use it. Auto-Tune is very well-known for its prominence in hip-hop, though it is not limited to that genre alone. Developed in 1997 by Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune is a pitch correction software that shifts vocal recordings to the correct key. Despite being used to make vocals sound “better,” hip-hop artists have used the software to create a new sound, very noticeably Auto-Tuned.
The software was not an invention, it was merely an innovation of the talkbox, coming out 50 years prior to Auto-Tune’s development. The talkbox was quite literally a box that one would place on their throat while speaking, omitting an altered voice. The talkbox then evolved to a plastic tube that was placed in the musician’s mouth, directing the vocals to the pitch-altering instrument.
The shift from the talkbox to Auto-Tune was initiated by Cher in 1998 when “Believe” was released. Not long after Jennifer Lopez released her hit song “If You Had My Love” in 1999, with very noticeable use of Auto-Tune at some points throughout the song. This song is what birthed the “Father of Auto-Tune,” hip-hop/R&B artist T-Pain. T-Pain has stated that Lopez’s hit song is what introduced him to the beauty of Auto-Tune, later releasing his debut album in 2005 with every song utilizing the software in the most extreme fashion the music industry had seen yet.
In the 3 years after, popular hip-hop figures Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne released albums which used T-Pain’s extreme Auto-Tune style, contradicting what critics felt to be a fad. The use of autotune by hip-hop’s biggest artists caused more musicians outside of hip-hop to utilize it. When asked about Auto-Tune in 2016, Charlie Puth, an award-winning pop artist, exposed that “everybody” uses the software to alter vocals. The criticism that Auto-Tune received, and continues to, has not slowed down the software’s momentum.