Florida State University Libraries Honors Theses The Division of Undergraduate Studies 2012 Auto-Tune in Africa: A Study of the Factors Leading to the Phenomenon Andrew Stanley Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact
[email protected] Abstract: Auto-Tune is a fascinating phenomenon in the modern music industry. It has gained a large amount of popularity over the past ten years, and it is constantly heard in popular music hits and on the radio. However, in most discussions involving music, Auto-Tune is often regarded as a novelty, or as something that serious musicians do not bother using. This stigma has followed it into scholarship, where there has been little to no study of its impact. Auto-Tuneʼs use is not only limited to the United States. It is particularly popular throughout the African continent, which is the region I chose to focus on in this thesis. This thesis seeks to answer why Auto-Tune has become so popular in modern African popular music, and to provide evidence of said popularity. I believe that this question can be answered by looking at three facets of modern society. First, Auto-Tune appears to have become a globalized commodity that links and unifies different regions and the mindsets that utilize it. Additionally, the music industry has been working towards a goal of near total control over music production since its creation, and the influence from the large record companies around the world has grown over the last ten years, leading to a dispersal of this mindset, in form of a musical “standard” of production.