Mondo Knows Facts
Auto-Tune was meant to hide mistakes
The 1997 software corrects pitch to the nearest note almost instantly Set to work slowly it sounds natural, and set to work fast it hard bends a voice. That obvious setting became a deliberate style rather than a fix. The tool started as oil industry signal processing before it reached music. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Orchestras tune to A at 440 hertz by international agreementThe standard was agreed in London in 1939Orchestras tune to A at 440 hertzThat number was agreed internationally only in the twentieth centuryPerfect pitch is rare in adultsRoughly one in ten thousand people can name a note without a referenceA vocoder uses a voice to shape another soundBell Labs built the first versions in the 1930s to compress speech for telephonyDigital workstations replaced the tape roomSoftware let an engineer edit waveforms on screen instead of cutting tapePro Tools moved editing from tape to screensDigidesign's software let engineers cut and undo takes without losing them
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Tags: pitch, effects, software
Auto-Tune was meant to hide mistakes: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The 1997 software corrects pitch to the nearest note almost instantly. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.