http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/06/09/080609crmu_music_frerejones080609crmu_music_frerejone/p>

No one has used Auto-Tune's zero speed setting more consistently and successfully than the R. & B. singer T-Pain. Born Faheem Najm, in Tallahassee, he has become such a common guest on pop records that in a single week last year he was featured on four singles in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including the No. 1 song, Chris Brown's “Kiss Kiss.” In the same way that the dry, flat drum sounds in Fleetwood Mac's “Rumours” will forever say “mid-seventies,” T-Pain and Auto-Tune will forever remind people of the late aughts.

T-Pain, who is currently working on his third album, “Thr33 Ringz,” spoke to me on the phone from his studio in Miami. He first heard the Auto-Tune effect on a song by Jennifer Lopez—he doesn't remember which one—and borrowed it for a mixtape appearance in 2003. He says it's no trade secret that he uses Auto-Tune with the retune speed set to zero, and likes to recall a time he spent selling fish out of a truck with his father in Tallahassee: “My dad said, ‘They can know what you're using, but they'll never know how to use it. They can see that we're using salt and pepper.' ”

The Auto-Tuned T-Pain is rarely a mopey presence. In his hands, the program becomes pop music's rose-colored glasses, or a balloon's worth of helium inhaled. His vocals hang, flickering, and suggest not a technological intervention but a chemical one. His vocal hooks sound delirious, not desperate.

Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music. Whether the engineer merely tweaks a few bum notes or makes a singer tootle like Robby the Robot, recorded music is still a composite of sounds that may or may not have happened in real time. An effect is always achieved, and not necessarily the one intended. Aren't some of the most entertaining and fruitful sounds in pop—distortion, whammy bars, scratching—the result of glorious abuse of the tools? At this late date, it's hard to see how the invisible use of tools could imply an inauthentic product, as if a layer of manipulation were standing between the audience and an unsullied object. In reality, the unsullied object is the Sasquatch of music. Even a purely live recording is a distortion and paraphrasing of an acoustic event.

Sir George Martin, via e-mail, wrote to me about his work with John Lennon, one of the most famously processed voices in pop history. “It's true that John was never satisfied with the sound of his voice,” Martin explained. “He failed to realize that what he heard came through the bones of his body and was not his true sound. He was always looking for perfection, and in his imagination his voice was always superior to the sound of anything on tape.” To paraphrase, what we hear on Beatles records is Lennon's imagination. T-Pain's deployment of Auto-Tune is a similar assertion of self, no different in kind from the older, more traditional tricks of tape-splicing, double-tracking the voice, and adding a little reverb.

When I asked T-Pain if he could ever forgo Auto-Tune, he said, “I got a song on my album about my kids. I ain't use it on that one.”

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