Perfection: Still Overrated

A recent video breaks down what's incorrect about pitch correction

At what point does a powerful music technology – like the pitch correction software used in recording studios everywhere – go from occasionally deployed magic eraser to ubiquitous tool, affecting the way singers and instrumentalists do their work?

OK, trick question! That’s already happened. (See Meghan Trainor, et. al.).

Let’s go a step or two farther down Doomtown Boulevard: When does this  widespread use begin to change the discipline of singing itself, eroding (and eventually rendering obsolete) the interconnected set of finely calibrated skills that artists use to align their vocals with accompaniment?

This video, one of many from the British musician and YouTube presence Wings of Pegasus, argues that that’s already happened too.

In it, host Fil – a guitarist whose channel showcases his original music and many (many!) videos that analyze performance practices and technological aids – endeavors to answer a viewer’s question: When Kelly Clarkson sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on her daytime TV show, were her vocals pitch corrected?

Initially Fil scoffed at the idea. Clarkson is a talented professional with a long history. In the great big universe of pop stars, Clarkson is among those whose instincts about pitch and phrasing are strong. She doesn’t need the technological crutch.

But the tape doesn’t lie. And Fil’s methodical breakdown, aided by visuals that map the pitch of both the voice and accompaniment, illustrates not only how pitch correction works, but why it’s arguably a pernicious force (if, that is, you care about the unretouched conveyance of human emotion).

This spontaneous-seeming Clarkson performance clearly had some post-production love. Fil points to a moment where the guitar accompaniment is flat, well below the desired pitch. He shows that the vocals have been pitch-corrected to be perfectly in tune, and there’s a visual that helps underscore the resulting friction with the guitar. In real time she might have reacted to the guitar’s pitch without even thinking, to establish common ground.

But when the software snaps her voice to an arbitrary standard, the result is oddly, digitally, surreal. It takes the agency away from the artist, denies her the use of her best instincts – and, in turn, denies the listening audience the thrill of hearing her deploy those instincts to escape awkwardness. It swaps the human sound for some hollow algorithmic notion of perfection.

Fil looks pained as he drives home the point: “This is a major thing that people don’t realize, I’m sure Kelly doesn’t realize this, that she’s now taken herself out of context.”

And then, just in the name of context, Fil cues up the familiar Judy Garland version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Which has wild swoops and intervallic leaps and her carefully controlled era-appropriate vibrato. Sometimes in the course of a phrase, Garland veers away from the written note, far away. These don’t register as violations of some important musical law – they’re just tactics a singer might use to increase the tension, the bold leaps and semi-reckless swerves that go into a memorable phrase.

We need singers who are brave enough to do that – see Billie Eilish, among others. We need producers who are brave enough to fight to keep what Simon Cowell used to disdainfully describe as the “pitchy” moments – if only because these expressions of humanity, the blood and guts outbursts that pull us into the song, are becoming endangered.

As the producer and music sage Aaron Luis Levinson said to me recently: “When the contributions of the technology exceed the contributions of the artist, the art is in decline.”

For me, the most troubling aesthetic question around pitch-correction falls under the heading Implications for the Future. If singers don’t need to develop a finely honed instinctual sense of pitch (or precise timing) because whatever they record can subsequently be “fixed,” they will eventually have no reason to devote years to the study of these fine points. By extension, if audiences don’t experience these moments, if their entire musical diet consists of carefully scrubbed and fastidiously aligned “perfect” performances, will they ever warm up to those singers whose art is gloriously rough around the edges? Not catastrophizing here: Do the torrid ten-tones-at-once shouts of a Janis Joplin, or the elegant coruscating stumbles of a Tom Waits, have a longshot chance of captivating listeners several decades from now?

Of course we’re already too late with these questions. We should have been asking them a generation ago, before the widespread embrace of these software tools changed the dynamic of making music – and its very sound, and feeling. People talk about the music industry as the canary in the coal mine where streaming was concerned, and maybe that’s also true now of the rapidly emerging life-or-death issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence software: Be mindful about what’s being sacrificed on the altar of convenience. There are downsides to perfection. (See: Meghan Trainor.)

Just one footnote: The Clarkson performance that Fil of Wings of Pegasus so skillfully illuminated was aired on a TV show. It was not for a record. Even for a super-vain diva (which Clarkson is not!) this was, comparatively, a low-stakes situation. That didn’t stop someone on Clarkson’s team from firing up the plug-ins and manipulating the performance. What explains this? The culture’s runaway obsession with optimization? Fear? Or maybe it’s just because the tools exist and the temptation to use them is simply too great?