Directions:In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go
over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet
1 . For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices
marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the
information given in the passage. Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect If you haven’t been listening to pop radio
in the past few months, you’ve missed the rise of two seemingly opposing trends.
In a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of
pop vocals suddenly sound great. Better than great: note- and pitch-perfect, as
if there’s been an unspoken tightening of standards at record labels or an
evolutionary leap in the development of vocal cords. At the other extreme are a
few hip-hop singers who also hit their notes but with a precision so exaggerated
that on first listen, their songs sound comically artificial, like a chorus of
50s robots singing Motown. The force behind both trends is an
ingenious plug-in called Auto-Tune, a downloadable studio trick that can take a
vocal and instantly nudge it onto the proper note or move it to the correct
pitch. It’s like Photoshop for the human voice. Auto-Tune doesn’t make it
possible for just anyone to sing like a pro, but used as its creator intended,
it can transform a wavering performance into something technically flawless.
"Right now, if you listen to pop, everything is in perfect pitch, perfect time
and perfect tune," says producer Rick Rubin. "That’s how ubiquitous Auto-Tune
is." Auto-Tune’s inventor is a man named Andy
Hildebrand, who worked for years interpreting seismic data for the oil industry.
Using a mathematical formula called autocorrelation, Hildebrand would send sound
waves into the ground and record their reflections, providing an accurate map of
potential drill sites. It’s a technique that saves oil companies lots of money
and allowed Hildebrand to retire at 40. He was debating the next chapter of his
life at a dinner party when a guest challenged him to invent a box that would
allow her to sing in tune. After he tinkered with autocorrelation for a few
months, Auto-Tune was born in late 1996. Almost
immediately, studio engineers adopted it as a trade secret to fix flubbed notes,
saving them the expense and hassle of having to redo sessions. The first time
common ears heard Auto-Tune was on the immensely irritating 1998 Cher hit
"Believe." In the first verse, when Cher sings "I can’t break through" as though
she’s standing behind an electric fan, that’s Auto-Tune--but it’s not the way
Hildebrand meant it to be used. The program’s retune speed, which adjusts the
singer’s voice, can be set from zero to 400. "If you set it to 10, that means
that the output pitch will get halfway to the target pitch in 10 milliseconds,"
says Hildebrand. "But if you let that parameter go to zero, it finds the nearest
note and changes the output pitch instantaneously"--eliminating the natural
transition between notes and making the singer sound jumpy and automat-ed. "I
never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that," he says.
Like other trends spawned by Cher, the creative abuse of
Auto-Tune quickly went out of fashion, although it continued to be an
indispensable, if inaudible, part of the engineer’s toolbox. But in 2003, T-Pain
(Faheem Najm), a little-known rapper and singer, accidentally stumbled onto the
Cher effect while Auto-Tuning some of his vocals. "It just worked for my voice,"
says T-Pain in his natural Tallahassee drawl. "And there wasn’t anyone else
doing it." Since his 2005 debut album, T-Pain has sent a
dozen slightly raunchy, mechanically cheery singles into the Top 10. He
contributed to four nominated songs at Grammy Award 2009, and his influence is
still spreading. When Kanye West was looking for an effect to match some
heartbroken lyrics, he flew T-Pain to Hawaii to see how many ways they could
tweak Auto-Tune. Diddy gave a percentage of his upcoming album’s profits to
T-Pain in exchange for some lessons. Even Prince is rumored to be experimenting
with Auto-Tune on his new record. "I know [Auto-Tune]better than anyone," says
T-Pain. "And even I’m just figuring out all the ways you can use it to change
the mood of a record." Rubin, who’s produced artists as
diverse as the Dixie Chicks and Metallica, worries that the safety net of
Auto-Tune is making singers lazy. "Sometimes a singer will do lots of takes when
they’re recording a song, and you really can hear the emotional difference when
someone does a great performance vs. an average one," says Rubin. "If you’re
pitch-correcting, you might not bother to make the effort. You might just get it
done and put it through the machine so it’s all in tune." Rubin has taken to
having an ethical conversation before each new recording session. "I encourage
artists to embrace a natural process," he says. With the
exception of Milli Vanilli’s, pop listeners have always been fairly indulgent
(纵容的) about performers’ ethics. It’s hits that matter, and the average person
listening to just one pop song on the radio will have a hard time hearing
Auto-Tune’s impact; it’s effectively deceptive. But when track after track has
perfect pitch, the songs are harder to differentiate from one another-which
explains why pop is in a pretty serious lull at the moment. It also changes the
way we hear unaffected voices. "The other day, someone was talking about how
Aretha Franklin at the Inauguration was a bit pitchy," says Anderson. "I said,
’Of course! She was singing!’ And that was a musician talking. People are
getting used to hearing things dead on pitch, and it’s changed their
expectations." Despite Randy Jackson’s stock American Idol
critique-"A little pitchy, dawg"-many beloved songs are actually off-pitch or
out of tune. There’s Ringo Starr on "With a Little Help from My Friends,"
of course, and just about every blues song slides into notes as opposed to
hitting them dead on. Even Norah Jones, the poster girl of pure vocals, isn’t
perfect. "There’s some wonderful imperfections of pitch on ’Don’t Know
Why’ from Come Away with Me," says Anderson, "and most of the other tunes on the
album as well. But I wouldn’t want to change a single note."
Let’s hope that pop’s fetish for uniform perfect pitch will fade, even if the
spread of Auto-Tune shows no signs of slowing. A $99 version for home musicians
was released in November 2007, and T-Pain and Auto-Tune’s parent company are
finishing work on an iPhone app. "It’s gonna be real cool," says T-Pain.
"Basically, you can add Auto-Tune to your voice and send it to your friends and
put it on the Web. You’ll be able to sound just like me." Asked if that might
render him no longer unique, T-Pain laughs: "I’m not too worried. I got lots of
tricks you ain’t seen yet. It’s everybody else that needs to step up their
game." Who once had to learn the Auto-Tune technique from T-Pain