Sasha Frere-Jones has a great little article in The New Yorker about Auto Tune, the effect so commonly heard in today’s pop, R&B, and hip-hop (it’s the effect T-Pain owes his entire career to). I’ve been a fan of this sound for at least 15 years or so — but when I discovered it (back in the days of Livin’ On A Prayer and California Love), it was generated by a instruments, like a vocoder or talkbox (see Peter Frampton, Roger Troutman, or Stevie Wonder). Today, a strikingly-similar effect is created in post-production using Auto Tune.
I personally have no real objection to the use of Auto Tune, and there are times I quite like it. However, I do see one glaring problem for artists like T-Pain that use it so extensively: you can’t perform live. Since Auto-Tune is a post-production effect and not something that can be done in real time (as can reverb, distortion, phasing, wah-wah, and many other effects we’re familiar with), there’s really no way to incorporate it into a live show. I once saw T-Pain sing “Buy You a Drank” on a TV talk show and it was laughable. It just sounded so wrong (and it wasn’t helped by the fact that T-Pain isn’t actually much of a singer).
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/06/09/080609crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=all
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