FUAIM Lecture: A Genealogy of Auto-Tune from Churchill to Cher. 01/02/24, 11:00am, Ó Riada Hall

8 Jan 2024

Happening On 01/02/2024

Since Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” critics and audiences have feared Auto-Tune’s effects on pop music. They often cast voice modification as the opposite of vocal expression and ability. But this critique betrays concerns about Auto-Tune that go far beyond concerns of “the music itself.”

In this talk, I show how Auto-Tune isn’t just a music technology with the cultural capital to catapult Cher and T-Pain to fame. Like many forms of media, it has a much larger scientific, military, and capitalist history. I argue that we must revisit the device’s original associations with wartime and oil profits in order to understand the ways it flattens or exaggerates aspects of race, age, and gender in the pop music industry today. By charting a history of voice modification technology from World War II to Exxon Mobil, I draw a line from Churchill to Cher where voice distortion has political and emotional effects. I use this recovered history to frame readings of music videos by Cher, Jennifer Lopez, and 100 gecs, who creatively distort industry norms. This context is crucial to understand concerns at the heart of popular music and media today, from technological limits and possibilities to artist resistance.

Amy Skjerseth is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Audiovisual Media at the University of Liverpool. She also co-directs the Music and Audiovisual Media MA program. Her monograph-in-progress, Audiovisual Thinking: Visual Waves of Popular Music, explores how 1960s transistor radios to 2000s vocaloids influenced both musical and visual culture. Her second book, also in progress, is called The Feminist Wall of Sound. Her work appears in Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; Journal of Popular Music Studies; and more. She also creates video essays, podcasts, and sound art.