Music History

How the Search for Fossil Fuels Ruined Music Forever

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with carbon emissions, cap and trade or climate change. It has to do with a dude named Andy Hildebrand who accidently discovered how to ruin music for everyone. From Business Insider.

Before inventing Auto-Tune, the software that would change the music industry forever, Andy Hildebrand was a research scientist in the oil industry.

Working for Exxon Production Research and then Landmark Graphics, a company he co-founded, Hildebrand developed software for processing data from reflection seismology, a method of estimating properties of Earth’s subsurface using reflected seismic waves. His innovations were great for finding oil, and they reportedly made him a lot of money. But reflection seismology was not his first love.

A professionally trained flutist since a young age, Hildebrand really wanted to be involved in music, and he found a way to transfer his skills to that field in 1990 when he launched Antares Audio Technologies, a company originally focused on digital music processing and sampling software.

His breakthrough with Auto-Tune was inspired by a fluke comment in 1996 or 1997, when a distributor’s wife mentioned how great it would be to have a device that kept her singing in tune, according to Greg Milner’s “Perfecting Sound Forever.”

*Sigh* Keep reading.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

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