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What is auto-tune?

That weird vocal effect that you hear on Chris Brown's music and more recently on Jason Derulo's Watchya Say is done using something called Autotune. It is sometimes used on other singers but in less extreme ways.

It is a bit controversial amongst some artists probably because it removes originality and rawness of some music.

"Auto-Tune was also used to produce the prominent altered vocal effect on Cher's "Believe," recorded in 1998. When first interviewed about this, the sound engineers claimed that they had used a vocoder, in what Sound on Sound perceives as an attempt to preserve a trade secret"

References sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotune#In_popular_music
• http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb99/articles/tracks661.htm

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Created by Antares Audio Technologies, Auto-Tune is a proprietary audio processor that uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances.

The technology was orginally developed for analysing seismograph data by Andy Hildebrand, an engineer working for Exxon. He subsequently realized that it could be used to detect, analyze, and modify pitch.