Auto Tune
1
The phase vocoder bends the pitch of my voice towards a norm.
Our ability to correct sung pitches was the unintended result of an effort to extract
hydrocarbons from the earth:
the technology was first developed by an engineer at Exxon to interpret seismic data.
The first poet in English whose name is known learned the art of song in a dream.
Bede says: “By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world.”
When you resynthesize the frequency domain of a voice, there is audible “phase smearing,”
a kind of vibrato,
but instead of signifying the grain of a particular performance,
the smear signifies the recuperation of particularity by the normative.
I want to sing of the seismic activity deep in the earth and the destruction of the earth for
profit
in a voice whose particularity has been extracted by machine.
I want the recuperation of my voice, a rescaling of its frequency domain, to be audible when
I’m called upon to sing.
2
Caedmon didn’t know any songs, so he withdrew from the others in embarrassment.
Then he had a dream in which he was approached,
probably by a god, and asked to sing “the beginning of created things.”
His withdrawing, not the hymn that he composed in the dream, is the founding
moment of English poetry.
Here my tone is bending towards an authority I don’t claim (“founding moment”),
but the voice itself is a created thing, and corporate;
the larynx operates within socially determined parameters we learn to modulate.
You cannot withdraw and sing, at least not intelligibly.
You can only sing in a corporate voice of corporate things.
3
The voice, notable only for its interchangeability, describes
the brightest object in the sky after the sun, claims
love will be made beneath it, a voice leveled to the point that I can think of it as mine. But because this voice does not modulate the boundaries of its intelligibility dynamically,
it is meaningless.
I can think of it as mine, but I cannot use it to express anything.
The deskilling of the singer makes the song transpersonal at the expense of content. In this sense the music is popular.
Most engineers aspire to conceal the corrective activity of the phase vocoder.
If the process is not concealed, if it’s overused, an unnatural warble in the voice results, and correction passes into distortion: the voice no longer sounds human.
But the sound of a computer’s voice is moving, as if our technology wanted to remind us of
our power,
to sing “the beginning of created things.” This the sound of our collective alienation, and in that sense is corporate. As if from emotion,
the phase smears as the voice describes
the diffuse reflection of the sun at night.
4
In a voice without portamento, a voice in which the human
is felt as a loss, I want to sing the permanent wars of profit.
I don’t know any songs, but won’t withdraw. I am dreaming
the pathetic dream of a pathos capable of re-description,
so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction.
It is a dream in prose of poetry, a long dream of waking.
Note
We often speak of style as both the marker of an individual and as the characteristic and collective manner of a demographic or period. No doubt these levels are related dialectically: the former is the way individuals refract the latter even while the latter is formed and reformed by that activity in aggregate. My style is how I style the period style, how it styles me. That’s why the American concept of “free verse” is a nonstarter, at least once the dominance of traditional prosody is no longer assumed. Style can be subtractive or additive but can only be either relative to a norm, a rule, and that norm is also a style and subject to change. But this is also why there is in theory some revolutionary horizon at which individual and collective styles would be reconciled, and so style would disappear. We have both utopian and dystopian fictions about what that might look and sound like. Perfect music or enforced silence. Or silence heard as music? One powerful, popular technology for imagining that reconciliation is the vocoder. It literalizes and radicalizes the recuperation of the individual style — the particular voice — back into the normative; auto-tuning makes a style of that recuperation itself, makes us hear phase smearing as a kind of vibrato or portamento. And in that sense the individual and the social (in an alienated form) have changed places; the machine has been called upon to sing.
For me the great parable of the contradictions of style is Kafka’s Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; a tension between the individual and the collective is already inscribed in the ambiguous “or” of the title. Is it about how the former can stand for the latter or how one must chose between them? It’s unclear why Josephine is renowned.
“The simplest answer would be that the beauty of her singing is so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf to it, but this answer is not satisfactory. If it were really so, her singing would have to give one an immediate and lasting feeling of being something out of the ordinary, a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing, something that Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear. But in my opinion that is just what does not happen, I do not feel this and have never observed that others feel anything of the kind. Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine's singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.”
I read Kafka’s inexhaustible parable as about the ultimately undecidable demand placed on the singer: to be a genius — to be exceptional, individual — at singing a collectivity that cannot tolerate that difference. The narrator’s dream for Josephine is that her style “will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten.”
Special thanks to Bomb magazine, where the poem Auto-Tune first appeared (without ancillary note)
Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of the novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House, 2011), and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010), all published by Copper Canyon Press. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a Howard Foundation Fellow. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie for the German translation of The Lichtenberg Figures. His art and literary criticism has appeared widely and he edits poetry for Critical Quarterly. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.