There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridge Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. It is the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop, and that is a great opportunity to dig into one of my favorite subjects to nerd out about, which is audio and kind of trends and audio how we respond to those trends and what.
It says about us as the culture.
The history of auto tune is a fascinating one and I think it really explains why I'm so hung up on audio trends as like a nerdy little side interest. So when I say auto tune, Mike, what comes to mind for you? Is there any one person that comes to mind when you think about auto tune? Yeah?
I mean, I'm no auto tune expert, but I think Tea Pain really is the artist who took it and ran with it and made it like his thing.
Yes, great answer.
I recently watched the t Pain NPR Tiny Death Concert, which is like a masterpiece. People should definitely watch it. But it kind of made me happy to see Tea Pain kind of coming full circle and kind of getting the flowers that he so richly deserves for being an innovator when it comes to autotune, and the history of how autotune went from this like kind of niche thing to being everywhere, to being hated to now being like commonplace,
I think is such an interesting one. And the reason that I want to tell this story now, in addition to being the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop, is that I think the conversation that we're having around technology and how it intersects with art and creativity really mirrors the conversation that we had around autotune. I'm specifically thinking here
about conversations around AI. You know, how will AI shape things like hip hop is a question that we are seeing artists grapple with in real time, And I think that's kind of because hip hop has always had this particular unique relationship to technology. It's always been this medium grounded in technology, and so historically rappers and hip hop artists can't really shy away from embracing technology. Hip hop has always been about innovation and trying new things and
using technology to create something totally new. So I really feel that if anybody can use new technology like AI to do something that does not feel like exploitation or derivative or lazy. It is hip hop artists because the creativity and innovation of traditionally marginalized voices is that powerful. So here's a little bit of a rundown of how hip hop artists are grappling with that question around technology and AI and how it will impact hip hop today.
Rapper Lupe Fiasco just announced a partnership with Google for a program called text Fx, which he says is meant to help artists during the songwriting process through the use of generating alternative meanings, spellings, and phrases to words initially chosen by the human song writer. It kind of sounds like an AI powered rhyming dictionary for rappers, and Lupey really says that this partnership was really grounded in the relationship that rap has always has his technology, saying rap
is born out of technology. Rap wouldn't exist if not for technological advancements. It kind of sounds like this tool is not meant to replace rappers or songwriters, but rather be a supplement to a human songwriter. Lupey explained, it does require you to do the work. It's not doing the work for you. It's just providing you with different opportunities and workflow for being efficient and offloading certain things
so that your mind can focus on other things. And then you have producers like Timbaland, who is exploring with making songs using AI generated versions of rappers who have died so that those more established rappers can be on
tracks with up and coming artists. Obviously, this kind of thing has gotten a lot of negative attention as being disrespectful or just plain creepy, but Timberland told Forbes that he feels the industry and consumers need to see a more serious, well intentioned, and transparent effort to integrate AI technology into hip hop, saying, I don't want to be afraid of what's going on. I want to be the
guy that figures out a solution. But on the other hand, you have rappers like ice Cube, who said that AI will make artists lazier and less creative and threaten to sue any platform or person who promotes an artificial intelligence generated version of his voice or likeness. And then there's Little Wayne, who I think had the best response to the rise of AI and hip hop.
Which is basically bring it on, lol.
Wayne said, I'm like is this AI thing going to be amazing too, because I am naturally organically amazing. I am one of a kind, So actually I would love to see that thing try to duplicate this motherfucker. I think the variety of responses to AI and hip hop that we're seeing now really mirrors the conversation that artists we're having back in the two thousands about the use of auto tune and music. Will it make musicians lazy,
less creative? Will it displace authentic vocalists? We're basically seeing artists have that very same conversation they were having about auto tune in the two thousands now with AI and the story of autotune is one where I think something that was once perceived as being a gimmick at best or at worst, a way to manipulate human artistry in a way that kind of creates this vibe that like, oh,
like humans are expected to sound like perfect machines. I think that was like a big concern that folks were grappling with around autotune. There was this big concern that autotune was going to de incentivize artists kind of needing to be good or needing to work on their craft.
Or perfect their.
Craft because you could just hit a button on a computer. But today, nobody thinks of autotune as just a gimmick. Nobody thinks of auto tune as something that, you know, de incentivizes artists to be creative or perfect their craft. It's just something that is totally commonplace in audio today. It's used in all kinds of interesting and creative ways because in the end, creative artists were able to make
something cool and innovative to create a cultural shift. And so I think that story as we talk about things like the intersection of music and AI, that story seems even more relevant right now. So let's talk about how autotune came to be. Autotune was originally developed by doctor Andy Hildebrand, a research engineer, and weirdly enough, he was not working in the music industry when he came up with the idea for autotune. He was working in the
gas industry. He worked for Exxon and created a complex set of algorithms to interpret sonar generated data to locate oil deposits deep underground. But he was also a musician, a flute player, and he always wanted to find a way to be more involved in the audio space. Him creating autotune was kind of a fluke. A wife of his colleague was joking about how bad her singing voice is, and she was like, Oh, if only there was a technology I could sing into that would help me sing
in tune. And I guess this idea really stayed with him and he got to thinking could the tool that.
He used in the oil industry also help correct pitch? Answer?
Yes, So it might be wondering why is this such a big deal. Well, before autotune, there were ways to correct pitch, but it was so time consuming that it was generally not considered to be worth it. Meanwhile, autotune was incredibly good, easy and fast to correct pitch, so it was a total game changer. This is something that
kind of comes up in podcasting a lot too. You know, when you're podcasting, the best take is generally your most natural take, and so when you say something and it just sounds so right, but maybe you caw or stumble or you know, trip over your words a little bit, if you redo it, it's never going to sound as good. And so one of the reasons why this technology is such a game changer is that it allows you to keep that natural first best take, but just polish the
parts that don't work. As you describe to NPR, the singer's first take is often their best. It's full of vitality and emotion. After their take, the producer will announce great, but the second phrase was pitchy, so let's do it again. Well, now the singer's worried about pitch and has to focus on intonation, and the vitality and emotion are gone from their performance. What auto tune lets the producer do is fix the first take, which makes a lot of sense.
In nineteen ninety six, he implemented the algorithm on a custom Macintosh computer and presented the results at the National Association of Music Merchants, a trade show for audio professionals, where it was instantly a massive hit. I can understand why, because, yeah, the frustration of having to completely redo a take because you're not able to just go in and perfect it is very frustrating. So I can understand why. When this was released people were like, oh my god, a huge
game changer. So autotune becomes a thing, but at this point it's kind of treated like a trade secret. Engineers were using autotune to discreetly correct pitch without really advertising it until someone sweeps in in nineteen ninety eight with shimmer and bangles and hellowing long black hair.
Can you guess who I am talking about? It's sure, it's fair.
So Cher's Belief in nineteen ninety eight was the song of the late nineties, right. Not only was it a musical departure for Share as an artist, but it's a song about transformations. So she as a as an artist is going through a transformation in her career, but also singing about the importance of transformation. And I think it's I think it's an arguable that Believe is SHARE's most
important song. I think it would be really easy for an artist like Share to kind of become a nostalgia act from her Sunday and Share days of the seventies, but she didn't. She kept evolving and kept innovating. At the Grammys that year, the song was nominated for Record of the Year and Best Dance Record, winning the latter, and it was a huge commercial hit too. Believe is one of the best selling singles in music history. And this is actually something.
That is like pretty hard to do.
The music scene of the late nineties was really fragmented, but Believe broke through as this global smash. It's also just really endured culturally, Like there's a Sex in the City episode where Charlotte thinks her boyfriend might secretly be gay, and one of the pieces of evidence is that he puts on shares Believe when they're like in the kitchen, And so I think it's important to really highlight what
a big deal this song is. Like if you've ever been on a dance floor and heard Believe, come on, it is like an emotionally resonant experience to be dancing to Believe on a dance floor, Like the song just does something to you when you hear it. And I also think it's interesting in that it's a song about someone who has been dumped, but that act of being
dumped is like a badge of honor. It is like that, like usually in a love song, the person who has been dumped is like sad or you know, grieving a lost relationship, grieving that they weren't enough for this person.
Who dumped them.
But in Belief, she is like righteous. She is not saying like I am sad, I'll get over this. She is saying I will transform. This moment is going to be a moment of transformation for me. And it's just one of those things like the line.
Do you believe in life after love?
Like it just it's one of those lines that I can't believe is not an established phrase or idiom because it just hits so perfectly. So in the song Believe, autotune was used to create unnaturally rapid corrections and shares vocals.
They basically removed.
That natural slide between pitches and singing, in effect creating that kind of robotic voice that you hear in the song Believes. Producer Mark Taylor originally did not want to tell people that he had used auto tune to get that sound. No, not because auto tune had a negative connotation yet, but because he wanted to protect the method as a trade secret.
So the team initially came up with a whole.
Cover story that if they were asked, they were going to say that they got that robotic vocal effect by using a vocoder pedal a vocoder. If you don't know what that is, it's similar to auto tune with different Apparently, Cher's label wanted her to remove the autotune effect, and she flat out refused. They even started calling autotune the share effect. So while all of this is going down in nineteen ninety nine, Tea Pain is just starting his
musical career. So when t Pain was three, he got interested in music because a family friend, jazz singer and producer Ben Tankard, allowed him to spend time quote twisting knobs at his recording studio. At age ten, t Payin turned his entire bedroom into a little music studio with a beat machine and a keyboard and everything. T Pain actually got his start as a rapper, but after being discovered, he decided that he wanted to sing instead of rap.
It's the early two thousands and T Pain they've been looking for a way to make his voice stand out. He hears the Dark Child remix of the nineteen ninety nine song if You Had My Love by Jennifer Lopez, which, by the way, I love that song, which uses a little bit of auto tune. He's also really inspired by the R and B graats like Teddy Riley, who used things like talk boxes and vocoders, which are kind of
similar to autotune but a little bit different. T Pain records his debut album, Rappa Turnt singer in two thousand and six and it gets to thirty three on the Billboard two hundred and a certified gold. He releases his second album, Epiphany, which is kind of like T Pain's magnum opis.
It's his thriller.
It's like the album that you think of when you think of T Pain. The album includes the song buy You a Drank, which is probably.
His biggest hit.
The song peaked at number one on the US Billboard Hot one hundred, making it his highest charting single as a lead artist. So something to know about this is that when that album first came out, it wasn't like people were criticizing T Pain as like a gimmicky artist.
The reviews were admittedly mixed, but people.
Were talking about him as a serious artist to watch, not like some kind of a joke one trip pony. So something that you really need to know about Tea Pain is that he legitimately saw autotune as his thing right. He did not see auto tune as popping on to a trend or a gimmick or a joke, because it was his way of exploring his own voice as a singer.
But everybody sees how successful.
Tea Pain is at doing auto tune and they all start jumping on the bandwagon. Snoop Dogg does it in two thousand and seven on his song Sensual Seduction. Loll Wayne does it in two thousand and eight with his song Lollipop. Kanye West releases the album Ato Eights and Heartbreak in two thousand and eight, a project that t Pain actually worked on. What's interesting about that is that I've heard te Pain talk about Ato Eights and Heartbreak.
Even though he was I think a consultant on the album.
I think he felt some type of way about how that album was received.
He talks about how.
He didn't feel like Kanye West did auto tune correctly on that album. It sounds like Tea Pain thought that the critical praise that Atoweights and Heartbreak got should have gone to him as a pioneer of the technology. What's interesting about this is that people associated Tea Pain specifically with autotune and a kind of cheapening of the music industry in general. But he was legitimately trying to use this technology to create something unique as an artist, just
like Share was. He said in an interview, like It's not like I was telling other artists to do this. I was the one doing it. Other people started doing it. I didn't tell them to do that. It's not my fault that this became a trend. In a really good long read about auto tune and pitchfork that will link to in the show notes, they talk about how this kind of put tea Pain in this like very weird position. He was at once a pioneer of this technology but also a critic of the way that other people were
using it. The piece points out that he claimed that he spent two years researching auto tune and thinking about it, including meeting with doctor Hildebrand, before attempting to use it. So when Tea Pain as compared to other artists who were jumping on the auto tune trend, he actually feels offended by this. He says, a lot of math went into that shit. It would take us a billion fucking minutes to explain to regular motherfuckers. But I really studied
that shit. I know why it catches certain notes and why it doesn't catch other notes.
So t Pain really saw.
Himself as like someone who was learning about a craft to explore his own artistry, and when other people saw this as a bandwagon to jump on.
He became the punching bag for it.
People associating te Pain negatively with autotune was something that he.
Really struggled with.
He's talked about this in interviews that there was this moment where he meets Usher, the singer Usher, and that Usher is the singer that he really respects, and Usher essentially personally blames him for a negative shift in the music industry. He says that Usher told him that he messed up music for real singers, and that Usher as
this great vocalist who te Pain really respected. In an interview, he said, that is the very moment, and I don't even think I realized this for a long time, but that very moment started a four year depression for me. And just fyi, Usher famously used auto tune in his song oh My God. So it definitely is a thing where artists who vocally criticized autotune even before it was so commonplace, also use autotune.
Let's take a quick break at our back.
So I knew that auto tune was like notoriously controversial in the music industry when I was first doing the research for this episode, I thought, oh, people just find it a little bit lazy, or a little bit gimmicky, or they just have a negative perception of it. What I did not realize is how much of an organized
negative publicity campaign surrounded autotune in the two thousands. At the Grammys in two thousand and nine, the band Deathcab for Quti showed up wearing blue ribbons on their lapels to protest the use of autotune in the muse industry. This sounds kind of funny, but it was very serious. There's an MTV dot com article about it titled Deathcab for Cutie raise Awareness about autotune abuse. Enough is Enough?
And in the article, Ben Gibberd, the lead of Death Caab for Cuti, says, we're here to raise awareness about auto tune abuse. I think it's over the last ten years we've seen good musicians being affected by this new found digital manipulation of the human voice, and we feel enough is enough. Let's raise awareness, let's stop this, let's bring back the blue note, and let's really try to get music back to its roots of having actual people
who sound like actual human beings. I read a quote from the singer Nico Case, who I know you've really like, Nicoka's right.
That's true, I do, and I to my knowledge, I've never heard her use AutoTunes. So I'm a little concerned where you're going with this.
Well, Nicokease does not use autotune, and in two thousand and six she told Pitchfork quote, I'm not a perfect note hitter either, but I'm not going to cover it up with auto tune. Everybody uses it too, I want. I asked the studio guy in Toronto how many people don't use autotune and he said, you and Nellie Fortado are the only two people who've never used it in here. Even though I'm not into Nelly Fortato, it kind of made me respect her. It's cool that she has some integrity.
And so I think what we really are seeing here is like auto tune being connected to like a lack of integrity or a lack of authenticity. This was the two thousands at a time where I think that there was a real binary between quote, real musicians, real artists and like pop poppy, bubblegummy kind of like gimmicks. And so I think part of the backlash was about this was a response to people being like, oh, now, these new fake musicians they're not real musicians. They're using auto tune.
They're fakers. Real music is like real music people using their real voice. And I can understand that sentiment, but honestly, there's nothing natural about the human singing voice.
Like your voice is a tool, it's an instrument.
And so this idea that any manipulation of that means that you're like not a real artist, I find sort of interesting.
Yeah, that adjective reel comes up on the show a lot, right, just to separate us from them pretty often kind of makes you wonder, wh who's the us and who's the them in that scenario.
So in two thousand and nine, the same year that Death Cab for Cut shows up wearing those blue lapel pens to protest autotune, Jay Z released the lead single of his album, The Blueprint three Da Death of auto Tune, and he said that he thought that autotune was like an overused gimmick. In that song, he calls tea pain out by name. Also, in twenty ten, Time magazine includes autotune in their list of the fifty worst inventions. On the same list with Agent Orange and subprime mortgages.
Not agent Orange, that pretty harsh.
I feel like Agent Orange has been responsible for more harm in the world than AUDI.
Yeah, like it literally killed a lot of people horrifically and caused a lot of cancer. I mean, I don't think AutoTunes killed anybody time.
So just like in conversations that we're having around AI and whether or not images that have been manipulated using AI should be labeled, which, by the way, we think they should. There was even a call to have it be labeled whatever a live performance used auto tune. Singer songwriter David Mendel started the live means Live campaign and he wanted there to be a logo that said live means live to let the audience know that when that person is performing, no auto tune is being used, no
backing track is being used. It is one hundred percent live. And I think that goes back to what we were just talking about. Like in the two thousands, there was this, I would argue, false dichotomy between author identic musicians and inauthentic musicians. You know, you had a lot of rappers calling other rappers quote ringtone rappers, which was like a negative term for a rapper that was like too poppy, too bubblegum, just trying to get money as opposed to like real rappers who are.
Doing something else entirely.
You have a lot of artists being called out for using you know, backup vocals tracks and they're in their live performances. In twenty thirteen, Beyonce famously was lip syncing to a vocal track when she performed at Obama's inauguration, and then she had to do a press conference where she belts out the national anthem a cappella and is like any questions, just to prove that she actually can
do it. Which, by the way, I've often found conversations around you know, having a backtrack going for a live performance like that inauguration. I was at that inauguration and it was a very cold day. The weather does stuff to your voice, Like I don't know. I feel like if you're performing an outdoor important inauguration, there's no shame in using a backtrack for a big moment like an inauguration to just need to sound perfect, and if you use a backtrack to accomplish that, I don't.
Think it's the end of the world.
Like I think it's sometimes the accusations are a little much, and I do think that some of this climate around inauthentic and authentic musicians does to me to seem like a way to criticize black musicians and poppy women musicians. Like you can't help but see people who see themselves as like real authentic rockers calling out people who use
auto tune. And it's curious to me who got caught up in the auto tune criticism, because like in radioheads two thousand and one album Amnisiak, they use auto tune. Tom Yorke described the use of auto tune on that album as quote, auto tune desperately tries to search for the music in your speech and produces noeset random.
If you've assigned it a key, you've got music right.
And so nobody was calling out when all this auto tune criticism was happening. Nobody was calling out Radiohead for using it. It was interesting to me who got called out publicly and who didn't. In that really good pitchwork piece I mentioned, they put it this way. Much of this anti autotune sentiment presented the idea that the technology
is a dehumanizing deception foisted upon the public. Attempting to deflect this angle of attack, Hildbrand once offered up an analogy with a generally accepted form of everyday artifice, asking
my wife wears makeup, does that make her evil? Perhaps because of Shar's involvement in Autotune's debut on the world pop stage, critics have often connected pitch correction and cosmetic surgery, comparing the effects to botox, face peels, college and injections and the rest in the video for believe Share actually
looks how auto Tune sounds. The combination of three levels of enhancement, surgery, makeup, and that old trick of bright lights that flatten the skin surface into a blank dazzle means that her face and her voice seemed to be made out of the same immaterial substance. If the believed promo was produced today, a fourth level of falsification would be routinely applied digital post production procedures like motion retouching or colorizing that operate at the levels of pixels rather
than poores, fundamentally altering the integrity of the image. The taste for these effects and the revulsion against them are part of the same syndrome, reflecting a deeply conflicted confusion in our desires. Simultaneously craving the real and the true, while continuing to be seduced by digital's perfection and the
facility and flexibility of use that it offers. That's why young hipsters buy overpriced vinyl for the aura of authenticity and analog warmth, but in practice use the download codes to listen to the music on an everyday level. So I definitely agree with that take, and I think that our response to autotune and the rise of auto tune culturally does say something about us that we want it both ways.
We want the slickness.
Of something that is clearly digitized, while also being able to call it out for being inauthentic or being repulsed by it.
It's like this real duality of life.
We want this, we create this, we have been trained as audiences to like this and respond to this, but also we find that very dynamic to be repulsive. But here's my thing, because Sharon T Pain or innovators, today, autotune is so commonplace that I would be willing to bet that most people don't even know that they're hearing songs that have been pitch corrected by autotune when they hear it. It is commonplace across all genres of music.
Even though we associate it more heavily with hip hop, it is in all different kinds of music, and autotune is not only used for things like pitch correction or making a singer sound better. Artists also use autotune in all kinds of unique ways. One of my favorites is the Kate Busch song A Deeper Understanding, which was originally
released back in nineteen ninety eight. Kate Bush has said that the song is a critics seek about our relationship with technology, saying this is about people, well, about the modern situation where more and where people are having less and less contact with human beings. We spend all day with machines, all night with machines. You know, all day you're on the phone, and all night you're watching the
telly press a button. And this happens, and this idea of someone who spends all their time with the computer, and like a lot of people, they spend an obsessive amount of time with their computers. People really build up heavy relationships with their computers. So the song initially had this computer voice on the track. In the original version, it's voiced by her son, but when she revisited that
song in twenty eleven. Pitchwork reports that she used auto tune to make the serie like voice of the computer sound like a guardian angel offering saragate solace and counterfeit company, saying hello, I know that you're unhappy. I bring you love and deeper understanding. So she used a heavily criticized
technology to critique our relationship with technology brilliant. So I think there's always going to be artists who find a way to use new technology in ways that are creative, because that's what creative people.
Have always done.
I saw this really interesting point in Traptal, a newsletter that covers the business of hip hop by Dan Runzi. So Dan points out that venture capitalist Chris Dixon has this concept about disruptive technologies that disruptive technologies always start out by looking like a toy. So when they come out like the iPhone, I remember someone saying I don't want to get an iPhone. It looks like a toy. It looks like a phone that like a child would use.
And I think there's something to this idea that technologies that are going to be disruptive and really take off as the next big thing. They do often start out by looking like toys, and so when something looks like a toy, it can be dismissed while also being phased in as something that's going to be disruptive. And so I think that auto tune was dismissed as this gimmick, right, this joke, and now it's everywhere, even though so many people initially dismissed it.
Yeah, that's a really interesting point, and it does really connect to the analogy you were making to AI earlier. Right when AI first became a big thing, we were all using DALLI to create images that were like sort of jokey, and it was like and like similar with chat GPT, just asking it questions for novelty, for funzies, and so it really does have this quality of feeling
a little bit like a toy. But I suppose, you know, quietly, on laptops around the world, people are using it for much more serious purposes.
Yeah.
I really think the comparison between auto tune and AI as technologies inso much that they will transform these creative industries. And I think the reason why I connect those two conversations in my head is because as we're having these conversations about how AI is going to transform the creative
spaces hip hop, music, the arts, film, television. A lot of those conversations have been really pessimistic, and I totally get it right, Like the striking screenwriters and actors are not wrong to be really concerned about the way that AI will impact their industry. Those concerns are absolutely fair
and grounded. However, I think that there's always going to be people who find ways to use technology to create something better, and so I think that we're at this pivotal point in the conversation around AI and how it's going to shape those fields where the question is do we want this technology to be used to exploit or to innovate. I think the screenwriters are saying, let's see
how this technology can be used to innovate. If AI is going to help me punch up a script, that's great, the powers that be should not bake my exploitation into
that model. I think that that's where and so this might surprise people, but I am kind of positive, kind of cautiously hopeful about how we see this play out, Because if there's anybody who can find a way to innovate with new technologies, it's creatives, it's hip hop artists, it's people like tea paid and people like share, it's innovators, and so I really want those people to be the ones who are leading the way in terms of how these how new technologies do shape creative fields, Like that's
what I want to see. How can they be used to innovate, not exploit. And it really comes down to something that tech historian Claire Evan said in the very first ever episode of their No Girls on the Internet.
There have been many instances in the history of music when a new technology has come along that extensibly is there to displace the musician. For example, the drum machine or the synthesizer. You know, these are tools that we're designed to replace session musicians with an easier, cheaper version kind of automation of their labor. In fact, even in the eighties, like the Britishmusicians Union tried to ban synthesizers.
But what artists and musicians did was instead of allowing those tools to replace them, they took control of them.
And you know, they took drum machines, and they took synthesizers, and they invented Detroit Techno, and they invented new waves, and they invented hip hop, and they invented you know, electronic music as it exists today, and as many manifestations, they kind of took the thing that was threatening them with displacement and incorporated it into what they were doing and made it essential to who they were and used it to invent something new that they were integrally as
human beings involved with. And I think that that act of kind of like I don't know, like like jumping on the grenade or something, is like a really beautiful thing that artists always do, willingly or unwillingly when they are faced with new technology. And I think when new technology comes along, you always have that choice. Are you going to let it displace you or are you going
to let it intimidate you? Or are you going to take it, you know, jump on it, find some new use for it, and make it part of who you are, and give it back to the world in a new form. That is all that choice is always present, and I think that's what I try to do in my work across the board, and I think it's the only way that we're going to kind of keep on top of all of this technology. And I think it's also very human.
I think it's what people always do. We are always trying to create systems of meaning and beauty out of what is coming up ahead. And I think that will never change.
Claire really put that so beautifully, and that is a sentiment that is echoed by one of my favorite bands, daff Punk, who used auto tune in their song one More Time. They said a lot of people complain about the musicians using auto tune. It reminds me of the late seventies when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesizer. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just replacing the instruments that came before.
And so I think that's where we are right now.
We are at the crossroads with so many technologies of are we going to use this to innovate or are we going to use this to exploit? And that is the question that we are asking right now about new technologies, and that is a question that innovators like Share and Tea Pain answered with a resounding innovator. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tegody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode
at tenggody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Tod. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.