* Photo: Joseph Maida * From Lil Wayne's cyborg-slick singing on "Lollipop" to the Twiki-tweaked vocals of T-Pain, use of the voice-enhancing software Auto-Tune has reached a fever pitch. But it turns ...

Explore the fascinating evolution of the vocoder, talkbox, and Auto-Tune, tracing their journey from Bell Labs through World War II to their influence on Daft Punk in this episode of Version History.

When T-Pain and his synthesized vocals made their debut with the songs “I’m Sprung” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” three years ago, most people dismissed the hits as novelties and expected the ...

Auto-Tune can serve as an additive or a crutch, but it has opened the floodgates for a relentless wave of untalented goons in the mainstream. The constant Auto-Tuning of vocals begets formulated, ...

Stop Smiling Books/ Melville House; 335 pp. The room contains two turntables and a microphone. Hulking consoles line the walls, covered in dials and gauges and blinking lights, like the bridge of ...

Believe it or not, Cher's dance anthem "Believe" has just turned 20 years old. The song, released on Oct. 22, 1998, kicked off a Cher renaissance, cemented her role as a pop icon and popularized a ...

There are few musical technologies that are as ubiquitous, maligned and misunderstood as Antares’ Auto-Tune. What was conceived in 1997 as a discrete tool for cleaning up vocals and optimizing the ...