(CNN) -- This is the summer of Auto-Tune.
The Gregory Brothers have become a viral hit with their 'Auto-Tune the News' videos.
Set to the tune of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are a-Changin', animated versions of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama, George Bush, and Dick Cheney sing of their presidential hopes. Viewers had the option of inserting their own face as that of a harassed voter.
No matter how hard some people -- notably Jay-Z --have tried to kill the trend of musicians using computers to make their voices sound like whiny robots, Auto-Tune technology continues to ride a cultural high.
Now the voice-altering effects are migrating from recording studios to YouTube and mobile phones.
An iPhone app called 'I Am T-Pain' lets people manipulate their voices to sound like the popular rapper and Auto-Tune advocate.
The Gregory Brothers, a sibling band out of Brooklyn, New York, has become a hit on YouTube with a series of videos that Auto-Tune cable newscasts and political speeches.
- Sep 15, 2009 Does President Obama make for a good Auto-Tune? You know, what was great from Obama was the campaign speeches. His campaign speeches were excellent, because he was sort of using that almost gospel.
- Dec 14, 2016 Obama visited China in November 2009, the first year of his presidency, which was a rarity. As a rule of thumb, a US president would not visit China unless he had won the second term. The reason behind Obama’s different approach to China is because the US cannot accommodate the rise of China, hence the “return to Asia” policy.
The group, which also tours as a low-fi soul band, started its series of videos called 'Auto-Tune the News' during the 2008 presidential debates and has gained millions of fans in recent months.
CNN spoke with Andrew Gregory, a 27-year-old member of the band, about the popularity of Auto-Tune -- the trademarked name for the popular pitch-correction software -- and the role of technology in music and society.
The following is an edited transcript of our conversation:
Why do you think your videos have taken off like they have?
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I think with any sort of viral video there's a little bit of luck involved. So we're counting our lucky stars that we've been lucky enough to have it take off like that.
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Barack Obama Auto Tune Youtube
At the same time I think the novelty of seeing people like Katie Couric and Newt Gingrich sing has really captured peoples' attention.
How do you make the videos? What actually goes into it?
Michael likes to joke that there's a huge Auto-Tune lever that he hooks up to his computer and whenever he sees video footage he just pulls the lever, and anything that strikes his fancy is automatically Auto-Tuned.
But there's a lot of technical stuff that goes into it. .. We scour a lot of footage to see what's going to work and what's not going to work. We try to find what people are going to tune well and what people won't tune well. ..
![Auto Auto](/uploads/1/2/6/1/126183708/614944317.jpg)
Really, by the time the video gets made I'd say it's eight or 10 days of work that goes into one of these videos, between the four of us.
What makes someone a good candidate for Auto-Tuning?
An example of a great candidate for Auto-Tuning would be either Katie Couric or Joe Biden. Both Katie Couric and Joe Biden have just continued to astonish us with their unbelievable, almost hidden melodies in their speaking voices.
A lot of it has to do with how they project their voice in terms of their soft palate. But it also has to do with how much of an oratorical fashion they speak. Joe Biden, in a lot of his speeches, is delivering them in a preacher sort of fashion that tunes really well.
While someone who ended up tuning really poorly -- we thought he would tune really well! -- was Sean Hannity. We thought he'd tune really well just because Sean Hannity is always talking really loud. But it turns out that despite the fact that he was talking really loud, it was a nasal talking and it was a harsh and abrasive loud voice, so it ended up not tuning well at all.
Does President Obama make for a good Auto-Tune?
You know, what was great from Obama was the campaign speeches. His campaign speeches were excellent, because he was sort of using that almost gospel-preacher rhetorical style.
Since he's been president, he's been so relaxed and sort of so laid back and cerebral and sort of intellectual. He's not been quite as excellent for Auto-Tuning because there's a lot more of a mumbly tone about him. A lot less of the 'Yes we can!' and a lot more of the 'Weeeeell, as we see ..'
Has 'Auto-Tune the News' helped your other musical efforts or do you think it's pulling you away?
It's certainly making us focus a lot more on 'Auto-Tune the News.' As the videos have sort of grown in scope and become more popular, we can't help but continue to work on them as our fans clamor for more.
Do you ever use Auto-Tune in the other performances, like in your band?
We've never used it live. We're no Ashlee Simpson. But I think we've used it a little bit on our record.
Right now it's a huge fad to Auto-Tune the crap out of people so that they sound like robots. But on pretty much any record you listen to these days there's some level of Auto-Tune on it, even if it's a very, very small amount.
If there's just one small note that's just a little bit flat, why wouldn't you Auto-Tune it to make it sound OK?
Do you think it's hurting music at all that people expect a singer's pitch to be perfect?
Barack Obama Auto Tune List
It means that people who can't sing as well are becoming famous singers. But I don't know, that's why I love going to see live music, because that really sorts out the real singers from the not-so-real singers.
If you could invent any technology or pick a technology that you would like to see invented, what would it be?
Oh, wow. I'd probably go for a teleportation machine myself. .. Like the one they used in 'Star Trek,' hopefully, right? Where you can jump in the teleportation machine and get to your gigs without having to carry all your amps and drive eight hours in your van. I mean, I play music for free. It's carrying my amps and driving places in my van that I have to charge people for. That'd be the real revolution for the music industry.
Do you have the T-Pain iPhone app?
Yeah, we were beta testers for that app.
Do you use the app in day-to-day life?
We've been joking around and showing it to friends who didn't have it yet. But we're playing our first concert in a while tonight [September 11]. I'm in North Carolina. And we're going to try to hook our iPhones up to the sound system and we're going to try to T-Pain our voices live. So we'll see if it works.
![Barack Barack](/uploads/1/2/6/1/126183708/493093266.jpg)
Do you have a favorite iPhone app just in general?
I'm not much of an app guy, but when I really need to kill some time I go for PapiJump. It's like the simplest, dumbest game possible on the iPhone. Other than that, the New York Times app is nice.
What have you learned about the Internet in watching your videos go viral?
I think a lot of people are using the Internet for just a sort of quick laugh fix. Whether you're bored at work or looking for something fun to do at home, people sort of live serious enough lives. I think everyone loves to laugh. And if you can get five minutes of the day at work .. to get a couple yucks in, I think you'd rather do that than watch your latest YouTube conspiracy movie or something.
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The Hollywood Idiocracy has let out a primal scream to protest Donald Trump, the people's president. Members of the collective convened to convulse like Linda Blair in 'The Exorcist,' to the sounds of Gloria Gaynor in 'I Will Survive.'
This particular protest was made up of mediocre females: Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Hailee Steinfeld, Chris Pine, Michael Shannon, Matthew McConaughey, Andrew Garfield, and Joel Edgerton (the last five are women with the Y chromosome).
Miss Blair, of course, was great in 'The Exorcist.' The same goes for the demon Pazuzu who possessed Blair's character (Regan MacNeil) in the film. At his gurgling snarling worst, Pazuzu was easier on the ear than the actors who primal-screamed their way through Gaynor’s fabulous, 1979 disco number.
How full of yourself must you be to sound and look as vapid as these celebrities did on the vid? A less self-aggrandizing group would have used the Auto-Tune technology, a must for the pop-pornographers who parade as artists these days! Or perhaps they did, and Team 'I Will Survive' is even worse than it sounds.
Speaking of self-adoration, I've lost count of how many goodbyes Barack Hussein Obama has bid. The countdown to President-elect Trump's inauguration has morphed into a search-and-rescue for the Obama legacy, except that when something is dead; it becomes a recovery operation.
The other day, Obama 'popped by' to say goodbye to Press Secretary Josh Earnest. I can't quite recall what 44 said, but the interlude was all about Obama.
Indeed, nothing Obama has ever said is memorable, or has intellectual acuity to it. This goes for his farewell address. President-elect Trump might be inarticulate and plain-spoken; but each of his words means something tangible and actionable. The incumbent's words, conversely, are like a Rorschach test: fuzzy, hazy verbal vapor, designed to absorb the listener’s projected emotions and reflect them back soothingly.
The cliché is the operative word in an Obama sentence. Visit any random site or video clip featuring Obama excerpts and you’ll hear mind-numbing banalities. Here’s one at random (2009): “What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart.”
As measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a “Smart Politics,” 2012 study concluded that “for the third straight Address, the President’s State of the Union message was written at an eighth-grade level.”
During his interminable farewell address, Obama appeared to imply that because some western immigrants were once disparaged and discriminated against in bad old America—it follows that all immigrants to his newly transformed America should never-ever be doubted or rejected. What did I tell you about eighth-grade reasoning?
For the farewell address, Obama had asked BJ the Chicago Kid—is he a Malia crush?—to ululate the National Anthem. 'Take people's minds to another place' was the instruction BJ allegedly received. BJ's crushingly bad warbling took me back to 2009.
The scene was a 'sedate' soiree at the White House—down to the disco ball and the half-nude, pelvis-grinding Beyoncé. The soiree was held by the first lady for Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Bibi Netanyahu, also visiting, was confined to the basement.
Good times.
Barack Obama Auto Tune 2017
Back to the farewell address. No sooner had I tweeted, 'How long before our dreadful cur of a president mentions the ignominy of slavery and the glory of illegal immigrants'—than Obama went ahead and mentioned .. the ignominy of slavery and the glory of migrants and refugees.
Barack Obama Auto Tune Video
'White Americans' were encouraged to keep 'acknowledging .. the effects of slavery and Jim Crow,' and be cool about allowing 'minority groups' to 'voice discontent,' which is Obama's code for burning down neighborhoods.
'How long before the president belittles white yokels,' I tweeted next. Not one to disappoint, Obama followed with a derogatory reference to 'the middle-aged white guy.' 'From the outside,' noodled Obama, 'the middle-aged white guy may seem like he's got advantages, but he has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change.'
Yes, give him some change.
All in all, it was as though the guy failed to realize his vision had been rejected root-and-branch when Mr. Trump was elected. America's potential, intoned the POTUS, would only be realized if the American democracy works; if we have common purpose. Beware of a socialist preaching solidarity. What 'our democracy' actually demands is that the POTUS know the US was born a republic, never an unbridled democracy. In this republic, self-government was to trump centrally imposed solidarity.
To follow was an Obama audacity we won't miss. He praised his spoilt daughters for graciously wearing 'the burden of years' of life in the lap of luxury (courtesy of the taxpayer), a sentiment his wife, Michelle Antoinette Obama, voiced non-stop on the talk-show circuit.
As I write, 44 is making news with the Fake News establishment. Obama is giving a last, long press conference. The final love-in with an adoring press corps saw the president praise the sycophants in the room for keeping him honest. Obama's 'skeptic' lapdogs obliged, as they'd done for eight years, with a drubbing. The phrase '(Laughter)' is the most challenging in the transcripts of this, Barack Obama's last news conference.
Deplorables can agree with one sentiment Obama expressed on the occasion: 'I want to be silent for a while and not hear myself talk all the time.' Hear, hear.
We serenade Barack Obama, who just can't exit center stage, with the chorus line from 'I Will Survive':
Go on now, go, walk out the door
'Cause you're not welcome anymore ..
'Cause you're not welcome anymore ..