Tune in to ‘Auto Cher’
QUESTION Who invented Auto-Tune, which gave us the notorious Cher effect?
THE American singer Cher topped the charts all over the world with her dance hit Believe in 1998 thanks to a technical special effect that distorted her vocals in a way that didn’t sound natural.
It may have seemed like a gimmick at the time, but it re-established Cher as a pop icon and has gone on to be used in a lot of pop, R&B and hip-hop songs.
Auto-Tune is a trademarked digital software system invented by U.S. sound engineer and former professional flute player Dr Andy Hildebrand.
The premise wasn’t new, as techniques for altering or polishing a performance had been around for years to make vocals clearer and cleaner.
However, it was the first to use digital algorithms to make subtle corrections and perfect a singer’s pitch in real time.
Embedded within Auto-Tune’s many settings is a feature called discretize. It’s this that has made the system famous. When its extreme digital pitch correction is applied to a track, it results in a semi-artificial voice sound-effect.
Dr Hildebrand had experimented with digital audio sequences while studying electric engineering at Chicago’s University of Illinois.
Working as a seismologist for Exxon between 1976 and 1989, he specialised in using sound waves to locate oil deposits.
In 1990, he returned to music, founding Jupiter Systems, which produced Infinity, a looping technique for digital samples, using systems he had developed working in the geophysical industry. The company produced Auto-Tune in 1997 and, following its success with Cher’s Believe, Dr Hildebrand used Antares Audio Technologies, as his firm had been renamed, to roll out his invention commercially.
Auto-Tune has featured on countless tracks, with the once controversial discretize feature used prominently on songs such as Daft Punk’s One More Time, Faith Hill’s The Way You Love Me, Chris Brown’s Forever, Rihanna’s Disturbia and Kanye West’s Heartless.
Helen McLaughlin, Reading, Berks.
QUESTION What’s the origin of the phrase sowing one’s wild oats?
IT HAS been claimed the Roman playwright Plautus used the phrase in 194BC, but this is probably a modern translation.
The first verifiable references to the idea of sowing weeds instead of good grain are found in 16th-century texts. The crop sown commercially is Avena
sativa, the common oat. Avena fatua, or wild oat, has for centuries been the bane of commercial oat growing. It can’t be harvested, its seeds are difficult to identify and separate from Avena sativa, and it tends to multiply year on year.
The traditional way to remove it is to walk through a field and pull it out by hand. Modern seed cleaning and weedkillers have failed to eradicate it.
Thus, sowing wild oats became a metaphor for a useless occupation. It was first used for young men who frittered away their time on idle pastimes.
It quickly took on a sexual connotation, often used in an indulgent manner.
The earliest reference to the term in English comes from 1542. Thomas Becon, a Protestant reformer from Norfolk, used it in the non-sexual sense: ‘The tailors nowadays are compelled to excogitate, invent and imagine diversities of fashions for apparel, that they may satisfy the foolish desire of certain light brains and wild oats, which are altogether given to new fangleness.’
Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, put it best: ‘Boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles.’
R. E. Thomas, Malvern, Worcs.