The Democracy of a Distorted Voice

If you’ve followed the general movement of music criticism in the past eight years or so, you’ve doubtless encountered the roiling debate over autotune. The vocal effect is essentially a tool used by vocalists to lay their voices atop a predetermined framework of notes and has been hailed as both the standard of music’s avant-garde and one of the four horsemen of music’s apocalypse. Opponents argue that autotune is a crutch and a flashy mask for concealing a lack of true musical talent; proponents counter is that autotune facilitates a new form of expression that opens up new avenues for voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. The fight over autotune expresses one of the Internet age’s central conflicts: the struggle between one’s own voice and the voices that fill one’s environment.

The critical consensus has moved decisively in recent years towards an acceptance of autotune’s legitimacy. While Kanye West’s “808s and Heartbreak” received mixed reviews on its release (largely for its departure from traditional rapping and its use of autotune), it has since been recognized as an important demonstration of the effect’s value. In the past year alone, everyone from swaggering West protégé Travi$ Scott to earnest, melancholy Brooklyn cult favorites Porches has released critically acclaimed albums using autotune. Autotune at its most useful is a tool for mapping one’s voice systematically and forcefully onto another form of meaning—that of melody and harmony. In this respect, the musical trend points toward a larger trend in digital culture: the appropriation of expression from others to find one’s own.

One of the most recognizable and widespread expressions of this phenomenon comes through the advent of widely available, relatively easy-to-use image editing software. Originally designed for editing one’s own images, programs like Photoshop have since become known equally as a means for humorously manipulating images taken by others. A large community on Reddit exists solely for friendly communal competitions of humorous reinvention of photos. This process often manifests itself as a manner of popular discourse as well; a never-ending series of convoluted movie posters serves as a tome of derision for the bumbling “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” films. A similarly parodic but more reverent series of images serves to express a generation’s appreciation of Neutral Milk Hotel’s album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” These appropriative forms have become a method of critique.

The democratic and accessible nature of such modes of expression has steadily woven itself inextricably into digital social discourse. Finding one’s own voice is connected more closely now than ever to speaking with the distorted voices of others, and all kinds of social media services exist partially—if not exclusively—for this aim. The popular app Dubsmash lets users lip-sync to songs, often giving the music humorous new contexts. More mundanely, Facebook’s sharing feature and the now-ubiquitous retweet allow users to use the words of other users to make points of their own, either to emphasize or critique the points of pundits and friends. Snapchat’s face-manipulating lenses feature allows users to haphazardly adopt the visages of everyone from a dog to the Mona Lisa. Increasingly, manners of public discourse involve a layering of one’s own voice with the aspects of others.

Given the ostensibly empowering nature of finding one’s voice in the voices of others, some doubts still remain. Can a voice truly be your own if it originated from someone else’s feelings and experiences? Is an artist speaking through the autotune, or are the imposed harmonic structures doing the real talking? At their core, these questions aren’t new to the digital era. The appropriation of the voices of others has been a human practice ever since those voices have been preserved. The tradition of quoting scripture to express one’s thoughts has endured millennia. Shakespeare almost never wrote a play without culling the general plot from some older source. Jazz music, arguably the most extensive art form that America calls its own, garnered significant popularity from its reimaginings of popular showtunes. And while Dubsmash formalizes the phenomenon, people have been lip-syncing to express their own emotions for years. The Internet doesn’t have a monopoly on bringing the voices of others into our mouths and placing them at our fingertips. The digital era simply makes more urgent the age-old question of self-identity: Where does the self end and the other begin?

—Staff writer Michael L. McGlathery can be reached at mlmcglathery@gmail.com.