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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140220T170000
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CREATED:20140123T153900Z
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SUMMARY:Jonathan Sterne\, "Who Tunes Whom?: Auto-Tune\, the Earth\, and the Politics of Frequency"
DESCRIPTION:Jonathan Sterne\, McGill University\nAuto-tune is a ubiquitous vocal effect in popular music and the best-selling software plug-in in the short history of commercial digital audio software. When used with subtlety\, auto-tune fixes slight errors or variances in pitch (usually of singers); when used more drastically\, it produces a very recognizable vocal effect\, “locking” a voice to a scale\, or drastically altering it.  \nAuto-tune was developed out of reflection seismology technology\, which uses sound for locating natural resources underground and beneath the ocean floor. In this paper\, Sterne gives a cultural history of auto-tune as a form of signal processing\, drawing on patent documents\, interviews\, operational protocols\, tuning standards and competing acoustemologies. Auto-tune effects a resource management of the voice. The obvious artifice in its most extreme forms points us back to a centuries-long project to technologize human voices through standards and tuning. While journalists and music fans may argue over auto-tune’s relationship to the authenticity of the voice\, Sterne shows that it is embedded in a much broader politics of frequency. \nJonathan Sterne is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University\, and for January-May 2014 a visiting researcher in social media at Microsoft Research New England.  He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012)\, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke\, 2003); and numerous articles on media\, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge\, 2012).  His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability\, technology and perception. Visit his website at sterneworks.org.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jonathan-sterne-auto-tune/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Jonathan-Sterne.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MIT%20Comparative%20Media%20Studies%2FWriting":MAILTO:cmsw@mit.edu
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