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Started by Ama Mensah (@amamensah) ·

AutoTune was invented by someone who used to look for oil

Andy Hildebrand spent years in the oil industry processing seismic data before he wrote AutoTune. He's said the idea came from a colleague's wife joking that she'd like a box that made her sing in tune.

6 sources · 34 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
Who invented Auto-Tune?
Ended at
Pitch correction

The Trail

  1. “who invented autotune” (google.com)
  2. AutoTune (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Reflection seismology (en.wikipedia.org)

    same kind of signal processing, pointed at rocks instead of voices

  4. Autocorrelation (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Believe (Cher song) (en.wikipedia.org)
  6. Pitch correction (en.wikipedia.org)

What I came away with

It detects pitch with autocorrelation, which engineers had written off as too computationally expensive until Hildebrand found a shortcut. It was meant to be invisible. The robotic 'Cher effect' on Believe (1998) is the correction speed cranked to the extreme so the voice snaps between notes instead of sliding.

Keep going