Twenty Years Of The "Cher Effect"

Twenty years ago this summer I was working in my "former life" as an IT contractor. At the site where I was working someone had a radio in the office. Different people had different tastes, and the dial went back and forth between country, rock and pop on a regular basis.

One day, the radio was tuned to the local pop station (which was actually more "adult contemporary") when a dance song came on that I hadn't heard before. The voice sounded really familiar, but it was strange somehow. It didn't sound quite . . . human.

It was Cher, and the song "Believe" marked the first notable use of auto-tune in a hit single. Auto-tune is a digital effect, originally created and released by Antares Audio Technologies in 1997, that automatically corrects the pitch of incoming source material. If you set the effect a certain way, pitches that are very flat or sharp will "snap" to the correct pitch, creating a robotic effect. This was quite striking when applied to Cher's voice, because her singing style has always relied heavily on starting very flat and then sliding up to the correct pitch.

It reminds me of a guy who was getting a similar effect years earlier. Roger Troutman was active in the soul/R&B scene in Dayton when I was growing up. He experimented with an early version of what would become known as a vocoder. The vocoder (or "voice encoder") could modulate a signal, say a synthesizer, to make the sound of words. It was Roger's "thing" and he used it to great effect on what may be his best-known single, with Zapp.

"I Want To Be Your Man" combined the synthesized vocals with human voices to a degree that I still find stunning even today. By 1998 though, with the advent of auto-tune (or the "Cher effect" as it was long known) anyone could sound like a vocoder.

For a while, it seemed, everyone did.

There was a period of several years going into the 2000s where it seemed every new single that came out featured heavy-handed use of auto-tune. I've heard some singers try to imitate the effect in live performance. Auto-tune has become so common in pop music that Progressive Insurance made fun of it in one of their commercials a couple of years ago.

Of course, like many things that are overused, it eventually got old. Auto-tune is now so maligned, producers have dialed back somewhat on its use. They no longer generally go for that "Cher effect" so much. If you listen carefully though, you'll still occasionally hear very subtle pitch shifts in song vocals that tell you auto-tune is still alive and well.

Which, really, is sad. After all, "to err is human." To err with deep feeling can be divine.