This Mining Engineer Invented Auto-Tune

Image by Electronic Beats

Autotune. . . you either love it or you hate it. Regardless, the origins of the effect are not what you would think. In this article, we learn about what inspired mining engineer Andy Hildebrand to create one of today’s most popular vocal effects.

“At a dinner party, a guest challenged him to invent a tool that would help her sing in tune. Based on the phase vocoder, which covers a range of mathematical methods to manipulate the frequency representation of signals, Hildebrand devised techniques to analyze and process audio in musically relevant ways…”

Learn the difference between auto-tune and pitch correction.