In 2009, the first big backlash against the omnipresence of Auto-Tune kicked off. On “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” Jay-Z accused his hip-hop contemporaries of going pop and soft: “Y’all n****s singing too much/Get back to rap, you T-Pain-ing too much.” Defining himself as a bastion of pure lyricism, he declared a “moment of silence” for Auto-Tune, a machine made obsolete through overuse. That same year, Death Cab for Cutie turned up to the Grammy Awards sporting blue ribbons that obliquely symbolized the eroded humanity of music-making, via jazz’s blue notes. “Over the last 10 years we’ve seen a lot of good musicians being affected by this newfound digital manipulation of the human voice, and we feel enough is enough,” declared frontman Ben Gibbard. “Let’s really try to get music back to its roots of actual people singing and sounding like human beings.” Guitar-maker Paul Reed Smith upbraided Dr. Hildebrand in person, accusing him of having “completely destroyed Western music.” In May 2010, Time magazine listed Auto-Tune among the 50 worst inventions of the modern era, alongside subprime mortgages, DDT, crocs, Olestra, pop-up ads, and New Coke.

Even T-Pain spoke up, trying to pull off a tricky juggling act—claiming pioneer status and preeminence in the field while simultaneously criticizing recent exponents for not knowing how to get the best results out of the technology. He claimed that he’d spent two years researching Auto-Tune and thinking about it—including actually meeting with Hildebrand—before he even attempted to use it. “A lot of math went into that shit,” he said. “It would take us a fucking billion minutes to explain to regular motherfuckers. But I really studied this shit... I know why it catches certain notes and why it doesn’t catch certain notes.”

The backlash kept on coming. Despite having used Auto-Tune and other vocal treatments on ecstatic tunes like “One More Time” and “Digital Love” off 2001’s Discovery, Daft Punk staged a back-to-analog recantation with 2013’s Random Access Memories: In interviews, Thomas Bangalter exalted live musicianship and complained that Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and other digital platforms had “created a musical landscape that is very uniform.”

Even Lady Gaga, the queen of all things plastic-fantastical, tried the “this is the real me” switch with 2016’s “Perfect Illusion,” which drastically reduced the Auto-Tune levels on her singing and saw her adopting a dressed-down, cut-off jeans and plain T-shirt look for the video. “I believe many of us are wondering why there are so many fake things around us,” Gaga said. “How do we look through these images that we know are filtered and altered, and decipher what is reality and what is a perfect illusion? ... This song is about raging against it and letting it go. It’s about wanting people to re-establish that human connection.”

Much of this anti-Auto-Tune sentiment presented the idea that the technology is a dehumanizing deception foisted upon the public. Attempting to deflect this angle of attack, Hildebrand once offered an analogy with a generally accepted form of everyday artifice, asking, “My wife wears makeup, does that make her evil?” Perhaps because of Cher’s involvement in Auto-Tune’s debut on the world pop stage, critics have often connected pitch-correction and cosmetic surgery, comparing the effect to Botox, face peels, collagen injections, and the rest. In the video for “Believe,” Cher actually looks how Auto-Tune sounds. The combination of three levels of enhancement—surgery, makeup, and that old trick of bright lights that flatten the skin surface into a blank dazzle—means that her face and her voice seem to be made out of the same immaterial substance. If the “Believe” promo was produced today, a fourth level of falsification would be routinely applied: digital post production procedures like motion-retouching or colorizing that operate at the level of pixels rather than pores, fundamentally altering the integrity of the image.

This is exactly the same business that Auto-Tune and Melodyne are in. The taste for these effects and the revulsion against them are part of the same syndrome, reflecting a deeply conflicted confusion in our desires: simultaneously craving the real and the true while continuing to be seduced by digital’s perfection and the facility and flexibility of use it offers. That’s why young hipsters buy overpriced vinyl for the aura of authenticity and analog warmth but—in practice—use the download codes to listen to the music on an everyday level.

But has there ever really been such a thing as “natural” singing, at least since the invention of recording, microphones, and live amplification? Right at the primal roots of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley’s voice came clad in slapback echo. The Beatles enthusiastically adopted artificial double-tracking, a process invented by Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend that thickened vocals by placing a doubled recording slightly out of sync with the identical original. John Lennon also loved to alter the natural timbre of his voice by putting it through a variably rotating Leslie speaker and by slowing down the tape speed of his recorded singing.

Reverb, EQ, phasing, stacking vocals, comping the best takes to create a superhuman pseudo-event that never happened as a real-time performance—all of these increasingly standard studio techniques tampered with the integrity of what reached the listener’s ears. And that’s before we even get to the digital era, with its vastly expanded palette of modifications. It could be further argued that all recording is intrinsically artificial, that the simple act of “canning” the voice in a preserved form to be reactivated at will in places and times remote from the original site of performance goes against nature, or at least breaks drastically with the thousands of years when human beings had to be in the presence of music-makers to hear the sounds they made. If you go back just a little way, you invariably find that the very sounds or qualities that the likes of Death Cab for Cutie prize as “warm” or “real”—like fuzz-tone guitar, or Hammond organ—were considered newfangled contrivances and lamentable depletions of the human touch.

In a profound sense, there is nothing necessarily “natural” about the unadorned and unamplified human voice. More often than not, singing involves the cultivation of technique to a point where you could almost conceive of styles as diverse as opera, scatting, yodeling, and Tuvan throat singing as tantamount to introjected technology.

“Voice is the original instrument,” according to the avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara. Which is true, but it also suggests that the voice is just like a violin or a Moog synthesizer: an apparatus for sound-generation. This combination of intimacy and artificiality is one of the things that makes singing compelling and more than a little eerie: The singer squeezes breath from the moist, abject depths of their physical interior to create sound-shapes that seem transcendent and immaterial. Singing is self-overcoming, pushing against the limits of the body, forcing air into friction with the throat, tongue, and lips in exquisitely controlled and contrived ways. That applies as much to the history of pop, for all its down-to-earth aspirations and vernacular aura. “Falsetto,” that staple of so much pop music, from doo-wop to disco to today’s R&B, contains the idea of fakeness in its very name. The next logical step would then be to simply resort to external assistance. Which is why, when you listen to the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons or Queen you almost hear them reaching towards an Auto-Tune sound.

Another commonly heard accusation mounted against Auto-Tune is that it depersonalizes, eradicating the individuality and character of voices. In their natural mode, vocal cords don’t produce a clear signal: there’s “noise” mixed in there, the grit and grain that is a physical residue of the process of speaking or singing. This is the very aspect of the voice—its carnal thickness—that differentiates one from another. Digital transmission can interfere with that anyway, especially at the lower bandwidths—it’s why, say, if you call your mom on her cellphone from your cellphone, she can sound unlike herself to an unsettling degree. But pitch-correction technology really messes with the voice as substance and signature. Given that this embodied quality, as opposed to the learned dramatic arts of singing expressively, is a big part of why one voice turns us on and another leaves us cold, surely anything that diminishes them is a reduction?

Maybe, and yet it is still possible to identify our favorite singers or rappers through the depersonalizing medium of pitch-correction—and to form a bond with new performers. In fact, you could argue that Auto-Tune, by becoming an industry standard, creates even more premium on the other elements that make up vocal appeal—phrasing, personality—as well as extra-musical aspects like image and biography.

Take the example of Kesha. She found ways to use Auto-Tune and other voice-production tricks to dramatize herself on the radio as a sort of human cartoon. It’s hard now to listen to her early hits without hearing them as documents of abuse, in light of her ongoing legal battles with producer Dr. Luke, but 2009’s breakout smash single “Tik ToK” is a case study in how to push personality through a depersonalizing technology: the deliciously impish gurgle that wracks the line “I ain’t comin’ back,” the word “tipsy” slowing down like someone about to pass out, the screwed deceleration of the line “shut us down” when the police pull the plug on the party. The sheer gimmickry of these effects suited Kesha’s image as a trashed ‘n’ trashy party girl, mirroring her love of glitter as a form of cheap glamour.

These and other examples also lay waste to the related argument that pitch-correction is a deskilling innovation that allows the talent-free—performers who can’t sing in tune without help—to make it. Actually, it refocused what talent in pop is. The history of popular music is full of super-professional session singers and backing vocalists who could sing pitch-perfect at the drop of a mic, but for whatever reason, never made it as frontline stars—they lacked a certain characterful quality to the voice or just couldn’t command the spotlight. Auto-Tune means that these attributes—less to do with training or technique than personality or presence—become even more important. Hitting the right notes has never been that important when it comes to having a hit.

Related to the complaints about falseness and impersonality is the accusation that Auto-Tune, especially in its overtly robotic-sounding uses, lacks soul. But you could argue the absolute reverse: that the sound of Auto-Tune is hyper-soul, a melodrama of micro-engineered melisma. Sometimes when I listen to Top 40 radio, I think, “This doesn’t sound like how emotion feels.” But it’s not because it is less-than-human. It’s because it’s superhuman, the average song crammed with so many peaks and tremors. You could talk of an “emotional compression” equivalent to the maximalist audio compression that engineers and music fans complain about—a feelings equivalent to the loudness war, with Auto-Tune and Melodyne enlisted to supercharge the tremulousness levels, while the teams of writers involved in any given pop single squeeze in as many uplifting pre-chorus moments and soaring ecstasies as possible. The end result is like froyo: already clotted with artificial flavours, then covered in gaudy toppings.

Writing about the rise of sequencers, programmed rhythm, sample-loops and MIDI, the academic Andrew Goodwin argued that “we have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.” That maxim could be updated for the Auto-Tune/Melodyne era: “We have grown used to connecting machines and soulfulness.” And that perhaps is the lingering mystery—the extent to which the general public has adapted to hearing overtly processed voices as the sound of lust, longing, and loneliness. In another meaning of “soul,” we could also say that Auto-Tune is the sound of blackness today, at least in its most cutting-edge forms, like trap and future-leaning R&B.

Finally, people have claimed that Auto-Tune irrevocably dates recordings, thereby eliminating their chances for timelessness. In 2012, musician, sound engineer, and recording studio owner Steve Albini groused about the lingering legacy of “Believe,” a “horrible piece of music with this ugly soon-to-be cliché” at its heart. He recalled his horror when certain friends he thought he knew opined that they kinda liked that Cher tune, likening the syndrome to zombification: “A terrible song that gives all your friends brain cancer and makes shit foam up out of their mouths.” Concerning Auto-Tune’s widespread use, Albini declared that “whoever has that done to their record, you just know that they are marking that record for obsolescence. They’re gluing the record’s feet to the floor of a certain era and making it so it will eventually be considered stupid.”

The counter-argument is to simply point at phases of dated-but-good scattered all through music history, where the hallmarks of period stylization and recording studio fads have an enduring appeal partly for their intrinsic attributes but also for their very fixed-in-time quality. The examples are legion: psychedelia, dub reggae, ’80s electro with its Roland 808 bass and drum sounds, the short sample-memory loops and MPC-triggered stabs of early hip-hop and jungle. Even things that might have annoyed the typical alternative music fan at the time—like the gated drums on mainstream ’80s pop-rock—have now acquired a certain charm. One wonders also how Albini can be so damn sure the records he’s been involved in making have escaped the sonic markers of their epoch. At this point, whatever his intent, I’d bet that the high-profile records he produced for Pixies, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and Bush all fairly scream “late ’80s/early ’90s.”