Please join both the Theater and Performance Studies and 20th/21st Century Cultures Workshops for:

Amy Skjerseth

PhD Candidate, Franke Institute Dissertation Completion Residential Fellow, Cinema and Media Studies

Who will Present:

Believing in Life after Auto-Tune: From a Gimmick to a Gambit for Creativity

Respondent: Michael Kinney, PhD Candidate in Musicology, Stanford University, AMS 50 Dissertation Fellow

Tuesday, January 11,
4:30–6:00 PM CST
Over Zoom

Please register for the workshop HERE. The workshop coordinators will circulate the Zoom link and Amy Skjerseth‘s paper to registrants prior to the workshop. 

(Please do not cite or circulate the works-in-progress without the author’s explicit consent.)

We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to TAPS workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu) or 20th/21st c. workshop coordinators, Dana Glaser (dglaser@uchicago.edu) and Chris Gortmaker (cgortmaker@uchicago.edu)

ABSTRACT: Critics and musicians have derided Auto-Tune as inauthentic and unnatural since its inception. Exaggerated uses of Auto-Tune, popularized by Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” have cast pitch correction as antithetical to vocal expression and ability—technology that effaces one’s “true” voice. Since singers don’t have to be in tune and can even use Auto-Tune live, critics often call it a gimmick. Auto-Tune exemplifies Sianne Ngai’s capitalist aesthetic category of the gimmick in its attractive-yet-repulsive promise to save time and labor (2020): it at once works too much and too little, is too backward but also too futuristic.

This chapter-in-progress examines music videos by Cher and Jennifer Lopez to dissect Auto-Tune’s complex discourse as a gimmick—and to show its status as a fundamentally audio-visual phenomenon. (After all, visual contours are integral to Auto-Tune’s waveform-tuning algorithm, which derived from deep-sea oil sounding techniques.) The sound of Auto-Tune is often judged on the basis of sight—whether the singer’s voice is in tune with expected performances of their gender or race. Auto-Tune’s gendered and racialized logics have been analyzed predominately through sonic means of production and reception, but a fuller picture can be gained by studying Auto-Tune’s accompanying imagery—ads, album covers, and music videos that illustrate Auto-Tuned effects. Visual depictions of Auto-Tune reveal not only essentialized beliefs about which voices index which bodies but also ways of interpreting how pop stars are branded as commercial personas.

While scholars are quick to show how Auto-Tune polishes “unruly” voices for easy consumption, performers like Cher and Jennifer Lopez exhibit cracks in its icy veneer. In their music videos, visual metaphors of teleportation and star personas show how Auto-Tune is more than a gimmick, as it can be wielded to create alternate forms of star personas that critique the commercialism of the pop music industry. Cher’s and Lopez’s imagery contextualizes Auto-Tune as a tool for new futurisms for pop personas before and after Y2K, and shows how Auto-Tune can transcend gimmickry to defy stereotypes of gender and genre.