Music: Talent or Not?
Scott Thurman
Mr. Reuter
Blog Post
Music – Is it Truly Talent?
This day and age has slowly, or in many cases quite quickly actually, worked its way far into the technological world. More and more us humans are becoming dependant on what technology can do and we are relying on it to almost do our jobs for us in some cases. Music is one of those places. All of the pop music of today uses more of the computer and technology than it does the actual singer/band. Other than classical, jazz, and most rock/metal, the more pop genres and alternative genres use auto-tune and many other gadgets and programs to make even the worst of musicians sound perfectly professional.
Auto-tune was created for tech artists to be able to save time, fix little timing errors, and fix pitch just a little if a singer or solo band member couldn’t quite get the right pitch or note out. What it’s become today is something that is overused, where singers and other musicians who really quite frankly don’t have a lot of talent are still made good using technology to make them sound heavenly compared to what they really sound like. Most of them even use their recordings for concerts. People these days are only in this business (the pop singers at least) for the publicity, attention, and money. According to today.com, it says, “The prevalence of Auto-Tune comes from two longstanding pop music traditions — the desire to alter the human voice and the quest for perfection at the expense of real talent and emotion.”
So how might this affect the economy or even individual finances? Well, as far as the individual goes, real talent is no longer recognized or understood these days. For the reason that no one is perfect, those who spent their whole lives practicing, being in bands, choirs, singing and playing for tons of different people and places are not recognized and given the opportunities they deserve because they’re being beaten out by people who are clearly not as good as they are yet have been made “perfect” (if sounding like a robot and not having any musicality like vibrato and dynamics is now what we classify as perfection) by auto-tune. Therefore, those who have the talent are unable to make it big meaning they have to find something else to do with their lives because our world sees backward.
The same article referred to above goes on to talk about how the first stages of the program were only able to give certain effects to the singers voice, but could not change pitch or tempo which means the people still had to be able to sing. Also, Michael Jackson became so popular before auto-tune really took over pop because he was one of very few people who could sing quite well but also had some mad dance moves. Today, people just look good, dance some dances, and let auto-tune do the rest. People are paying money to see these people like never before and what’s funny is they’re not even really hearing the singer sing – they’re hearing what they want to sound like and programmed it into a computer and are playing it back.
Dealing with the macroeconomics, auto-tune is the number one used music tool in the world (go figure) so that is making a ton of money and it’s not showing any signs of being passed up by something else. Auto-tune is ruining music, real musician’s lives, yet is being rewarded with a boat load of money and an astonishing amount of attention and adoration.
0 Response to "Music: Talent or Not?"
Post a Comment