Corporate-derived pop music, or as I call it, ROI pop (ROI = return on investment), has been around a lot longer than Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers. In the days of analog and early digital, each act barely eked out the 15 minutes of fame they were under contract to deliver. Now they appear here to stay, and ROI pop has become a well quaffed head on today’s all-powerful media-hydra. In the proverbial days of yore, also known as the ’70s and ’80s, ROI pop had to be tracked down—found in a magazine rack, record bin, or on a Saturday morning kids program. The original MTV only played it occasionally, and certainly didn’t cater to the genre in spite of a business model built for it. Much of the early ROI pop music had, at its core, some redeeming quality underneath the high fructose corn syrup packaging—a good singing voice or harmony, or the occasional good song written by someone far removed from the act. 

But today’s ROI pop is not content with just selling stickers, toys, pajamas, oh, and music. Through the marketing and mainline delivery into the vast global media network, corporations are able to use their manufactured pop products to aggressively seek 24/7 influence and control over their target audience.

Even though I am raising someone in Hannah Montana’s key demographic, I do not own a single Hannah Montana product—digital or plastic—and still I know how she sounds, looks, and acts. And this is without cable or satellite television. Simply by going to the mall, taking my kid to birthday parties, and from waiting in line at a chain store, I know more than I care to about her.

Corporate greed predates Ebenezer Scrooge, so ultimately that’s not why ROI pop is more prevalent and insipid than ever before. The real difference between a Montana and a Monkee is technology. Not just in how it is delivered to a consumer culture hungry for shiny things with hooks (just like trout!), but in how it’s made. Central to this is Auto-Tune, a pitch correction technology developed in my own backyard of Santa Cruz.

Antares released the first Auto-Tune in 1997. It was software plug-in for Pro Tools, and it was a big hit in pro audio circles. That same year, Antares released a hardware version, the ATR-1, which could process the signal in real time (in this case, real time equals about four milliseconds.) That meant tours, concerts, and puberty were all literally fixable when it came to singing to the masses. 

Auto-Tune is an important technology. It was intended to nudge components of core music, like vocals, back into key. It was never designed to be a core replacement technology, which, in the hands of a Disney engineer, it has become. For a while there, ROI popsters needed to have at least some talent, usually as a singer. But now talent is purely optional, perhaps even frowned upon since you know how temperamental and independent talented types can be. What corporation wants that in their product line?

Pitch correction is over-used to such a degree that it has become the sound of some pop vocalists—Britney and Hannah are examples of this. I won’t ask you to listen to either, but if you’ve heard them, you can tell there is a certain mechanical chorus sound in their vocals. That is pitch correction set to stun.

There is no doubt that pitch correction belongs in the studio to provide a little help as a last resort. Sometimes, just turning the vocals up in the singer’s monitors can fix a pitch problem. And live, Auto-Tune can be used respectfully and judiciously to save a voice or a vocal in the harsh world of singing on a big loud stage night after night. But the trick is that it must be used with great discretion. The first rule that must be followed is: If you can hear it, it’s too much. An even more important rule is that character and feeling are more important than perfection. Don’t look at the notes on a screen, just listen to them in context, and for crissakes don’t pitch correct emotion. Imagine if this technology was foisted on Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger when they hit the scene. Imagine Kurt Cobain or Nick Cave with perfect pitch. Perfection has no place in art or music (except Mozart). Flaws and constraint are channels of communication within all great works of music.

Arguably, using pitch correction as an effect has its place. But don’t complain when people say you sound like Cher or T-Pain. I am, of course referring to Cher’s last big hit, the dance number “Believe”, and the hip-hop star, whose renowned use of Auto-Tune has the unnerving effect of making a cool-looking black dude sound like Hannah Montana. The hook in Cher’s “Believe” is a blatant pitch correction effect that has since been overdone by T-Pain and by pop’s habit of consuming then regurgitating itself. Certainly not worth a Bob Mackie costume, but Grammy-worthy, evidently. Seriously, saying Auto-Tune is your sound is like having the lead guitarist in your band play a plastic Guitar Hero controller. (“Real guitars are for old people,” sayeth the prophet Cartman.)

Antares didn’t plan for their technology to contribute to bad popular music; they were just adding the fruits of their labor to the big pro-audio techno-pie, though it may be reasonable to assume that many of ROI pop’s biggest stars would still be wearing Cinnabon uniforms if it weren’t for Auto-Tune. Plus, the technology side of the music industry is so tiny, relatively speaking, and so competitive, that you cannot fault them for taking advantage of what Hannah Montana and her predecessors have wrought. Now other companies, like the German company Celemony and the venerable TC Electronics from Denmark, have engineered similar products. Celemony’s Melodyne is the current hot stuff due to its ability to broadly pitch correct and perform other digital signal processing (or “DSP”) without any artifacts. Ironically, these unwanted artifacts have become part of the ROI pop vocal sound. Melodyne also has some very cool things like adding believable-sounding sustain and formant changes (formants are what make a voice sound masculine or feminine). Today, most, if not all, music production software applications include some sort of pitch correction plug-in or feature.

The technology behind pitch correction is obvious when you think about it, but it is no easy feat to engineer. DSP in the box analyzes the frequency (pitch) of an incoming signal, like a vocal, then pitch corrects it to the next closest matching note (frequency) based on user-defined settings of key and other parameters (like jumping or gliding to the correct pitch). Then it sends the signal out, fast enough to sound real time. I bet you my Cher wig that somewhere in your music collection there is a track you love by a respectable artist that has pitch correction on it, probably from an Antares Auto-Tune device. You cannot tell pitch correction was used because the technology was used right.

I suppose one can argue that every musical genre and era has within it an overused substance that helped destroy it so the next big thing can come in. In the ’60s and ’70s it was drugs and drum solos; the ’80s, hair and makeup; the ’90s, plaid and ennui; and in the 2ks, it is technology and ROI pop.

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