Too Much Auto-Tune?

Having worked its way through techno and dancehall music for quite some time now, Auto-Tune has found itself in hip-hop and it is slowly making itself comfortable. Made popular in mainstream music by top 40 regular T-Pain, Auto-Tune is a proprietary audio processor that uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances, disguising inaccuracies and mistakes.

While many accept its use in pop music, a negative sentiment seems to be growing regarding its use in hip-hop music. In pop music it covers a wide range of uses, particularly with instruments, but in hip-hop, where the sole instrument that a rapper uses is his voice, its use is very obvious. Should rappers be entitled to modify and manipulate their voices in whatever fashion they deem appropriate for their artistic vision or does Auto-Tune pollute the form? This question can only be answered by noting the purpose of Auto-Tune use in hip-hop. Because pitch has never exactly been a point of contention in the genre, Auto-Tune is widely used for the appeal of its electronic sound to deliberately distort the human voice. In a sense, Auto-Tune's use in hip-hop captures the hip-hop spirit of appropriating styles and techniques from other genres and finding new and creative applications, a trend with a historical precedent in sampling. Regardless, I'd prefer to see it used a bit more tactfully and not as a crutch or a cheap gimmick which it has the potential of becoming.

Kanye West - Heartless