Auto-Tune always and forever

26:19But the effect, the autotune effect that people love, whether it's with T-Pain or Cher or Kanye, whoever, what you like is that hard tuning, the thing which is inhuman, and you like to play with it. And so most people actually will just go back to the classic mode. All right. I want to talk more about where we are right now with autotune, but first we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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27:30Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way. So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. That's strawberry.me slash unstuck. All right, we're back. Charlie Harding's still here. Hi, Charlie. Hello. So I want to talk about Auto-Tune kind of right now, because I think you've mentioned this a little bit a couple of times, But I think the idea that the existence of autotune has changed the kinds of music that people are able to make who didn't have certain kinds of skills or whatever before, but also the kinds of people who might be coming into the music industry has changed.

28:23So I'm curious if you look at sort of the sweep of like who is making music and the music that they're making. Can you look at it as like autotune changed all of this? The fact that autotune is everywhere and can make anyone singing sound pretty good. Like has that changed the entire music universe? I kind of think about it more like the development of the electric guitar. It was like a new instrument that people could pick up and it created this new sound. And so I think young producers today want to sound like autotune. just as in the 60s they wanted to sound like Hendrix right like it's the sound that is attractive and so yeah it does let anybody sing but only lets people sing if they can't sing with the auto-tune effect and that's probably the thing they're going for anyway it's slightly surprising by the way that that that sound has been popular for this long right like we're we're a long way into this world and again you go all the way back to to t-pain in the early aughts and share even before that.

29:24And like the idea that people like the sound of autotune has lasted a really long time. That's why it's more like a guitar or a distortion effect. It's a feeling that it gives people. It's not about vocal tuning. Like this is what gets people angry. It's like, that makes you inhuman. But no, no, no, no, no. It's like the electric guitar is also unreal, right? Like it's generating electrical signals that has to be amplified by an amplifier. It doesn't have all the acoustic properties of a beautiful acoustic guitar, but it also sings and speaks in its own unique way. And so that's how I think about it.

29:54I think that young people wanting to produce music want to sound like autotune. I mean, truly, when you record with autotune today, it's not a post-processing technique. I mentioned it earlier. People put autotune on their vocal from the get-go, and they're trying to play with the effect to get it to do this weird artifacting thing. They like all the things that it does imprecisely. that's why they use the classic mode they want it to sound like this thing from 1998 they don't want it to sound like a pristine pure tool that allows them to sing better it's not about that interesting so explain that to me a little bit because i think one thing i've read a bunch is that one big shift was when autotune went from a thing you did in post after you laid down a vocal track like it was a it was a post-processing tool to now something that you do live in the beginning and And there was a line in the, there's a really good Pitchfork story that you sent me about the history of autotune.

30:53Oh, by Simon Reynolds. Yeah, spectacular. There's a line in there that's basically like, there are a lot of singers who have never heard their takes without autotune. That is like, just my brain exploded thinking about that. And so, but you mentioned like thinking differently about the way that they're actually making this stuff in real time because of autotune. What does that look like? What would it be like in the studio to record in a sort of immediately post-AutoTune universe? I mean, people do this not just in studios, but in home bedrooms. I mean, the biggest stars in the world would intentionally travel to Hawaii to record and record in an Airbnb.

31:28They bring a microphone. They bring a portable, small recording interface. Oftentimes, they'll use one called the Universal Audio Apollo that allows you to run AutoTune on this little interface live without any sort of latency. so that when you're speaking into your microphone, you just hear yourself through autotune. And then they are singing, trying to get it to do things that make weird autotune-y sounds. I'm bad at singing with autotune. You actually have to be good at using the effect to make it sound right. You have to intentionally sing slightly out of tune to get it to sort of bend back into tune.

32:04You have to... So if you sing well, it actually doesn't get to do anything, so it doesn't work. Yeah, it's not going to be interesting. Yeah. I don't sing well, by the way. I'm not a vocalist, but like I am not good at using auto-tune to make it sound fun and creative. You actually have to be talented at using auto-tune and practice with it. So yeah, it's something you like bake into the sound before it even goes into your software. Like you can't turn it off after the fact now. Some people still do, but like a lot of people don't want to hear what their voice sounds like without it on. This is what I'm saying where it's like I think of it more like the electric guitar because to play electric guitar with a lot of distortion is fundamentally different than playing classical guitar.

32:43And if you ask a classical guitarist to play a super distorted electric guitar, they might not be able to control all the feedback that it creates. They might not be aware of how to get it to sing properly and vice versa, you know, like a fast lead guitarist on electric guitar might sound absolutely terrible on an acoustic guitar. It's a skill that you have to learn to sing into autotune. So you actually think of singing into autotune and singing without autotune as two just utterly different skills? I think that they are related skills, but to make autotune sound good, I think you've got to be good at it.

33:16Again, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to, I'm not arguing that you have to go to music school to learn how to do this, but you have to practice at it. It takes time. It's a skill that you have to develop as a musician. And when I do it, I don't sound good. It is common that people will use autotune to practice melodies and, you know, use it as a way of dealing with the fact that they aren't good vocalists. But again, I think that if you want to sound like T-Pain, you have to practice singing like T-Pain. And again, T-Pain is a great vocalist. Cher is a great vocalist. They're just not doing the same thing as, you know, Frank Sinatra was decades ago.

33:51It's just, yeah, it's just a different way of singing. Yeah. I feel like there are going to be some people who hate that, but I find that kind of fascinating. I love it. I think there are a lot of people that are not going to like what I just said, but I really believe it. We'll put Charlie's email in the show notes. You can tell them yourself. Thank you. I just know this through practice of working with musicians in studios, and some people are really good at using autotune and other people aren't. Yeah. How does that pertain to live music? Is it the same sort of thing as autotune has gotten more powerful?

34:21It's just present live the same way it is in recordings and it's fine? once again there are both ways of using autotune live some people need to have that effect on when they sing because like if you're travis scott and you're performing live in concert that is your sound so they developed ontario's developed an autotune live tool that you can run you know through your microphone on a live stage it's not baked into the microphone it's an effect down the audio chain at some point sure there is also autotune live used for that subtle vocal tuning to help people. You know, when you're running around on stage, it's exhausting.

34:57You might be out of breath. You're not hitting your pitches as effectively. There's all kinds of ways that vocals are enhanced to sound more like the original recording. Subtle auto-tuning is one version of that. Also playing backing tracks of like a thousand chorus vocals that are perfectly already in tune is another way that things sound more in tune when you're at a live recording. Yeah. So you sing the one, but there's 50 other yous singing it correctly around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I want that every time I sing. I know, totally. It's like, I always want my backing tracks. That's because people expect the recordings that they hear.

35:28And when you listen to your favorite artists, they're usually in the chorus singing at least nine versions of the track to add depth, width, chorusing. Like the thing that just makes it sound big and awesome. And, you know, bringing eight extra backup singers on tour is expensive. So you might just play the backing track and add a little tuning to your vocal because you're out of breath. So those are all different ways that people use autotune live. Either the auto-tune effect or the sort of more subtle pitch correction version of it. What's the like simplest, most mainstream version of that at this point?

36:01I think about the maybe video is a good metaphor, right? Where at the very high end, you have super high end video editing software. But we've boiled it all the way down to like you can edit pretty successfully inside of TikTok. And it has made it available to tons of people who are doing tons of different things. Do we have that equivalent for auto-tune? Like, is that just available to regular people in the way that like Instagram filters are? Yeah, I mean, there are iPhone apps that are like the autotune effect that have been developed by the Gregory brothers, who famously made autotune the news years ago.

36:34You don't have to call, they confess, we're looking for you, we gon' find you, we gon' find you, so you can run and tell that. If you buy Apple's Logic, which is their audio recording software, it comes with their own free version of pitch correction. Every software developer that makes audio tools has tried to make their own autotune effect, and they are cheaper than the Antares version. So there's all kinds of ways of getting into autotune if you want to try to autotune your vocals. It's very accessible. Okay. And is that a good thing? I feel like you would argue that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

37:09It's like, are you trying to argue that there should be like fewer paintbrushes and paints in the world so that we can have more Monet's? I think more creative tools for more people is great. yeah i i support it so there is one sort of new backlash to this that i i'm i've been thinking about a lot and i'm curious to get your feedback on so one thing i see on on tiktok and instagram and everywhere else these days is like these videos of singers in their kitchen or in like a garage or just wandering down the street singing these these beautiful soulful melodies do you do Do you know the ones I'm talking about?

37:47There's this one that's like a guy with a salt and pepper beard and he's just pouring coffee and his girlfriend is standing behind him and he just starts singing into an AirPod. And it sounds incredible. You let me clear up from the world. You didn't know I'd bring.

38:05And I'm like, first of all, the way I know this isn't real is because AirPods don't sound like that and you're lying. But like all that aside, there's been this really fascinating thing where a bunch of singers have, come up and gotten a lot of a lot of fans and a lot of fame and like record deals and some stuff out of these social videos that's a very like natural you know musician creator way to come up but then in every single one of their videos there is this giant comment section saying oh they're using auto-tune i'd love to hear what it sounds like without auto-tune it's auto-tune and it's like on the one hand maybe the argument is who cares but on the other hand it's like we're in this moment where authenticity is everything and also you're standing in your kitchen singing so the idea that i'm supposed to process this like a professional recording there's a disconnect there that i have always struggled to wrap my head around how i'm supposed to feel about this and i'm curious like if they were playing an electric guitar i'd be able to see the electric guitar right so i'm curious how you think about how auto-tune is supposed to fit in that version of music that we're in right now well i think auto-tune has become a sort of like catch-all for any sound that is post-processing that makes things sound more perfect than they are so yeah for example like if i'm singing in my kitchen there's going to be a bunch of reverb and it's going to sound really bad but there's all kinds of tools you can use to get rid of reverb after the fact uh there are ways that you can use just eq and compression and other very common tools and post-processing to make your voice sound better uh so even if i record with an iphone i can get my iphone to sound pretty close to a professional recording by having good processing tools.

39:44I think autotune has just been, yeah, is the catch-all enemy for anyone who doesn't like music, which is slightly unnaturalistic. I just want to say, if you don't like the sound of autotune, that's fine. Like, I think it's totally fine to have your taste. If you prefer how Sinatra sings, that's cool. Like, if you prefer how punk rockers sing, that's also fine. There are different aesthetics, and autotune is just one of them. It is the one that's really popular at the moment. If you feel that it's like, it sounds unnatural, I don't like unnatural, that's fine. But it just is another way of singing.

40:22And I think that this criticism is a bit overblown. Okay. I guess I agree to a large extent, but I do think there is something that I've, I just can't sort out inside of me that there's something about autotune that feels like hiding. that it's like if you're if you're if because i actually i buy the thesis that there are things that sound like autotune but i i do think and and maybe i'm wrong about this that there is still a real use of autotune that is not designed to be seen right like if you're right that 90 plus percentage of music is using autotune in some way like i don't know taylor swift is is not somebody people like she sounds like autotune but she's using it and there are people really pissed about that and yeah and because they're like oh it's dishonest in some way that this isn't actually what you sound like this is this is you this is the equivalent of like putting a face filter on yourself before you post a picture which is now another thing people have sort of visceral reactions to online in this moment of like fake authenticity and i don't know like do we need is there like is there like an auto-tune watermark that should exist on every song that uses it.

41:34I don't know. Well, okay. So, so you're, you're getting at this question of like authenticity, just with the pop star. Like we want something about us wants our pop star to be sitting right next to us, our best friend telling their personal stories. And yet we know that they're recording it in a professional studio, working with producers and songwriters to make this presentation, which is exciting and, you know, it enhances all of our emotions. So there's always this conflict about what is real and unreal in recorded music. And I think especially in pop music than other forms. We don't expect our actors to be themselves in a film.

42:05And yet pop stars are putting on a performance. And yet we have this expectation of they are who they say they are. You brought up Taylor Swift, for example, and Taylor Swift uses all kinds of vocal processing in her music. On the song Delicate, she uses a vocoder. On the song Midnight Rain, she uses a tool called formant shifting, where she sort of shifts the voice to sound more masculine. I don't like the moments in a Taylor Swift vocal where I can hear audible pitch correction done poorly. And I've heard it done one or two times. Sometimes when you're producing a song, you need to get it out fast for whatever reason.

42:42Getting these pitch tuning tools to sound natural actually is a skill. You can get paid a good amount of money just to do the really slow version of hand-drawn autotune. This is a big part of the craft. And what you're trying to do is make something which was a beautiful emotional performance be a little bit more in tune. And if you do it wrong, you hear this weird artifact that's unpleasant. I don't like when I hear that because it's the attempt of a naturalistic performance clearly being manipulated. you have to hide the tools you're using to clean things up in order for it to sound good. In the same way that a photoshopped photo that is poorly done and you can see some kind of weird, like, the anatomy of the person isn't right, we don't like that, even though we completely accept that every single magazine photo is photoshopped.

43:36Interesting. So there's a real, as long as you don't make me think about it, I can rock with it kind of thing. But it's like, as soon as you put this, you know, cognitive dissonance in front of my face, it's going to feel bad. Yeah. But otherwise, I can sort of internalize that it's happening. I just don't have to think about it. It's the same thing with CGI, right? So I just watched Alien Romulus recently. Nice. And the CGI of the android character is trying to recreate a deceased actor and it doesn't work. It's so obviously inhuman and even though they're an android, it's just like, it doesn't look right.

44:10But the rest of Alien Romulus is like full of CGI and at no point am I like, that alien just doesn't like feel alien enough to me so it's it's all about the context in his presentation anything which is supposed to be completely authentic and entirely natural that is processed we will perceive as that doesn't feel right things that are presented as i am a pop star on a stage and everything about me is like perfectly composed we accept that there is we don't accept we expect that things are going to have been enhanced so i just want to give everyone permission to be mad at auto-tune at certain moments, but when it's intentional, let go of it, whatever.

44:52Like if someone's trying to do it, let them do it. If someone's doing it poorly, fine, criticize them. Yeah, I like it. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and talk about where we go from here. We'll be right back.

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45:37All right, we're back. Hello. Charlie, we've gone long enough without talking about AI videos on YouTube. We've arrived. Let's talk about AI videos on YouTube. So I actually want to talk about basically two different pieces of where I think things might be headed from here. One is AI and one is back to the kind of authenticity thing. Let's talk about AI first. And I bring this up because I think there is a possible future for AI that looks a lot like the arc of AutoTune that you just described, where tool becomes available. Some people use it like a tool and it's rendered mostly invisible and it helps in the process and it becomes a tool in the toolkit.

46:18Other people will use it incredibly aggressively and showy and it will allow new people to do new kinds of things. ultimately some people will be pissed off about it but eventually it will just be rolled into how the music industry works and may even become like the dominant aesthetic in the way that autotune is could be totally wrong but i i there's something about that rhymes to me with where ai might be headed what do you make of that comparison well we'd have to break ai down into all the various ways that it's being used for music because ai is just sort of like a process that can be used in lots of different ways, from writing lyrics to separating a stem recording so you can separate the bass and drums and vocals and instruments from a recording, to generating whole songs for you from a prompt.

47:02There's so many different ways that AI is being used, some of which are maybe more invisible. For example, like if you use ChatGPT to help you find a rhyme, there's no way that I can identify that you did that. Except for that sometimes ChatGPT makes really bad rhymes. It's getting better and better. It really likes to rhyme like do and to, and it's like, great job, ChatGPT. Yeah, that's the thing. AI songs and poorly written songs use too many perfect rhymes. They're kind of just overly sweet, really bad single syllable perfect rhymes. That's the tell. But I don't think we've seen a tool yet that is marketed as an AI tool that has become a predominant sound in popular music.

47:43There's all kinds of AI tools that I use in my music production, but I don't think of them as AI. So like I use a Deverb plugin if there's too much reverberation in a recording and like technically it's using a neural net, but it doesn't really have a sonic fingerprint in the way that Autotune does. So I imagine there will be some kind of effect that will use some kind of AI neural net in its thing that will become a sound. But the AI as a methodology is sort of too broad to say that, well, we're going to hear AI in the future. Does that make sense? It does. And I think I hadn't really thought about it like that until you put it like that, but it is maybe the strength and weakness of AI is that it doesn't have a mark in its way.

48:26Like you can make an AI song that sounds like anything, but it's never really going to sound like itself in a way that is, I think, by design, right? Like all these tools are meant not to sound like themselves. They're all trying to mimic something else and they're all generally doing a bad job of it. And that maybe it would be more interesting if they had, like, if you went and made a song with Suno, that it sounded like something. And that maybe there is something to that that is actually missing from these tools. You know how like if you try to currently make an image of a person in Dolly 3 or Mid Journey, like it kind of has there's a style, there's a default style.

49:06And obviously there's all kinds of way you can get around that style. But it's this weird, somewhat cartoony, magazine glossy, very thin, like very white. Well, and there are the things, right? Like you look at the fingers and you look at the lapels and like they have their tells in that. They have their tells. Yeah, exactly. So right now, if you use tools like Suno or Udio, they do have their tells. And perhaps, you know, in 20 years in the future, people like I want to use classic Suno because I like the things that it does wrong. What are those tells? Like, how would you describe this? um okay so first of all a lot of it's trained on actually really low uh sample rate and bit rate uh mp3s uh just to like reduce the size of the uh of the data and so there is this like grainy hissy sound like it sounds it sounds like a bad mp3 from 1997 being played in winamp uh or maybe maybe like more relatable for folks would be like if you turn on am radio am radio has a sound where it's just like not quite high fidelity.

50:04There's a low fidelity sound. The sounds of instruments are strange. Like, okay, take for example, a horn section. If you try to make like a funk song with horns, the great thing about a horn section is nobody hits the note at exactly the same time at exactly the right pitch. The excitement is the subtle differences of eight horns all trying to do their thing at almost the exact same time. And that actually, that inhuman imperfection is what makes it sound really good. AI oftentimes just like makes it all too perfect. Same with vocals. The vocals sound actually pre-tuned. And so you can identify these things.

50:46In addition to the vocals are, the lyrics have way too many perfect rhymes, et cetera, et cetera. I actually assigned my students to NYU. One of their assignments was go to Suno, prompt it to write a song, grade that song based off of everything that you've learned in class. Now write your own song from the same prompt. And all of my freshman students wrote significantly better songs than the Udyu and Suno song. And most of them threw them out entirely. I asked them to try to incorporate elements of them into their track. And they're like, it's too hard. It's too bad. So, but maybe this badness could be something that we like in the future.

51:21Yeah. And that comes back to the other thing I want to talk about with this authenticity thing. I think a theory that I'm starting to hear more and more from people is that the next phase of culture in so many ways is going to be a spin all the way back to, again, whatever you want to think of as like, quote unquote, authentic stuff. Let's call it punk rock. Yeah, it's right. And people are going to deliberately start releasing vocals that sound worse because they are more honest somehow. And we're going to go back to not using the internet in the ways that we've been using it. Like this idea of just sort of eschewing all of this stuff because it has made us not ourselves anymore.

52:05And going back to like, I don't know, I'm going to I'm going to just put a bunch of instruments in a room and record like the Beatles 60 years ago. And that that is the next thing. Who famously used the music studio for all of its wild creative tools and use all kinds of post-processing vocal tools like Verisbeed and etc. So I'm just saying we've always been doing this. But yes, I hear where you're going. Again, the question of how far back do you have to go to find something quote-unquote authentic is a good one. We're all going to play the mandolin, guitar, and banjo and violin and sing in old-timey bands is what you're saying.

52:40Yeah, and if I sang flat on the take, it's going to be flat on the record. And I would say, historically speaking, there have been a lot of people who want us to go that way, and we have never, ever, ever gone that way. but I do think there's a reasonable argument that AI is like the end of a certain road of inauthenticity that maybe we are due for a pushback the other way. I think that that's a completely acceptable expectation. Like we've seen that trend many times in the history of popular music in the rise of electronic recording and the electric guitar, louder sounds and rock and roll. You had the folk resurgence after the super highly produced era of the 1980s, you had grunge as a pushback to that.

53:25So I think it's completely likely that we're going to see new sounds and styles emerging that do try to hearken to our most human sound as a pushback to anything that is AI. At the same time, I wonder if we've already reached peak authentic. Because if you go on TikTok today, I feel like every other thing on TikTok is the TikTok shop is some sort of advertisement and it's all filmed the exact same way. It doesn't matter if it's a creator with 10 likes or if it's progressive insurance, it's all like, Hey, I'm holding my phone. I'm backlit. I'm just like talking naturally, just shooting the breeze, whatever.

54:04Oh, and by the way, this is a progressive insurance. And so it's already been that like the authentic human thing in video has already been co-opted by advertisers. So where people go next, I think it might be weird. It might be something like auto-tune that is the effect of the next generation of music. Do you have any theory about what that might be in this world? What are the teens doing that is going to seem crazy to the old folks in a couple of years? They're still using a lot of autotune. It's not going anywhere right now. It seems like we have a... I joked about everybody playing the mandolin, and there does seem to be a Lumineer-style resurgence.

54:45And the music of Noah Kahn is a great example.

54:51I was going to say, thank you, stick season. Yeah, exactly. So I don't think there is the emergent thing yet. People are still having a lot of fun making music on their computers because it's the easiest way to record. So I think we're seeing more a branching of many different kinds of expression than a solidification around one sound. can i tell you my theory and i'm very curious what you think of this my theory is that the uh like voice memo demo is going to become an actual honest to god like genre of music oh interesting yeah i think that you see this all the time right where like the a song will come out and then like charlie pooth does this all the time uh he'll he'll go on tiktok or or whatever at some late night show and play his demo of the song where he's just like sort of inventing the melody in his head and trying to get it down into his phone and that part of me is starting to wonder like maybe we're going to get to the point where the the polished thing and the unpolished thing actually get to live next to each other if if instead of there just being sort of one canonical finished version of the thing what we actually want is lots of different experiences of this same kind of thing all the way down to just like the artist riffing into their phone for a minute and that that like we want to experience all of that as fans the new halsey record has multiple tracks that are exactly that that are basically like voice memos and demos and things that are interspersed and you know that that has a long history of like interlude tracks on hip-hop tracks that are kind of like oh this is a phone call but i i i like that i mean i want to just point out one other trend that has popped up as well as like the return to 1920s 30s jazz yeah or like what you might call classical pop with the artists like loyve who are making things that are a false nostalgia for music which is a hundred years old and that young people are into so yeah there's all kinds of routes uh i don't know if i really want to hear a lot of people's voice memos as we look at you know we're 27 years into autotune uh which is a long time in music genre and in pop music.

57:06Do you think if you fast forward a while, we will look back at this as kind of an autotune era in the way that we've had sort of distinct eras in music and it'll linger, but like the idea of autotune being kind of the dominant sound of music will go away and will be replaced by something else. And this will be the autotune moment. Or is this just going to be how music is forever? What's amazing about all listeners, whether they're a trained musician or not, is they can turn on a recording and often tell you, oh, that's like an 80s thing and I don't like the 80s. And the reason why they can do that is because snare drums were produced in a very specific way for the 1980s.

57:43There's lots of other production techniques that sound 1980s. And every era has these sonic artifacts of their moment. And they place them in time the same way that a point-and-shoot Kodak photograph from the early 2000s screams early 2000s. You can even have AIs generate things that look like point-on-shoot Kodak photographs, which are actually having a comeback. I've been at birthday parties recently where people are handing these things around to get that aesthetic. Yeah, people are out here buying, like, cool pics cameras from 2003 again. Exactly. And so I think that, you know, 20 years in the future, it may be that autotune is no longer the predominant sound.

58:19I think that's probably likely. But when someone's like, but I want to sound like, you know, 2008, they're going to use that again as an act of sort of creative nostalgia. So I think that we have been in the autotune decades. We'll probably move beyond it. But in the same way that like the electric guitar is not the most popular instrument today, but it's still ubiquitous in recording. I think that autotune will be around in some kind of form and it might just sort of fade into the background and pop forward later on. Who knows? Okay. But right now, we're still very much in the autotune era. I mean, I think the coolest record of the year was Brat by Charlie XCX and she admits that she has no longer has the ability to sing without autotune because it's just so part of her sound.

59:03She's like, I don't sound good with autotune anymore. And that record is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, if autotune is what it took for us to get Brat, I'll take it. We'll be all right. Amen. All right, Charlie, thank you so much as always. This was really fun. Thanks. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to Charlie again for being here. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's more on everything we talked about in the show notes. I highly recommend the Pitchfork story on the history of autotune. There's a ton of good stuff in there. I'll also link to Switched On Pop. So many great episodes of that show that you should listen to.

59:36Truly cannot recommend it highly enough. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other autotune songs that belong in the canon of AutoTune over the years? Please tell me. You can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. We have a bunch of fun hotline stuff coming up between now and the end of the year. So get your questions in. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday and Friday.

1:00:08Lots of news, lots of stuff going on, lots of fun things to talk about. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:00:22Off the top of your head, give me an intro to autotune playlist. What are, like, for somebody who is like, I want to experience autotune, what are some songs you would just recommend off the top of your head? Okay, well, I would first go to other vocal processing techniques, and you'd have to listen to, like, Croftworks, Trans Europe Express using the vocoder. You have to put Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger from Daft Punk, not autotune technically. You have to listen to some talk box like Show Me the Way by Peter Frampton, Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, California Love by Tupac and Dre. And then, you know, obviously you need to have Lollipop on there because I mean, what is autotune without Lollipop?

1:01:04You need what else has to go on there? certainly Travis Scott highest in the room the entire album of Brat but if any one song I'm more of a 365 than a 360 so I'm gonna say 365 Drake's In My Feelings Shares Believe T-Pain's I'm Sprung and I'm not gonna recommend Maroon 5's She Will Be Loved you also left out Blue by Eiffel 65 which I find personally outrageous but no that's because I mean that is I would have to have like a consumer warning on that playlist if you put blue on there because it is it is a devilish earworm. But I did say Lil Wayne's lollipop. So, you know, it's true. Proceed with caution.

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