In pop music, this has been the year of robotic crooning. Folks fell hard for the eery, warbly vocals produced by Autotune, a piece of pitch-correction software published by Antares. Think Kanye's latest, think T-Pain, think Daft Punk. Love it or hate, you know it when you hear it. Yes, it's like artificial sweetner for your ears, but sometimes that's just what you want. At least one of The Functionality's editors has an avowed Splenda addiction.

Autotune was developed more than 10 years ago as a way for record producers to subtly correct pitchy vocals after an artist had left the studio. What began as cosmetic has now become its own aesthetic. But the origins of Autotune are even stranger. As Sascha Frere-Jones described in his piece on the phenomenon in the New Yorker, the mathematical model behind Autotune actually came from using sound waves to prospect for oil.

Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune's inventor, spent eighteen years in a field called seismic data exploration, a branch of the oil industry. He worked in signal processing, using audio to map the earth's subsurface. His technique involved a mathematical model called autocorrelation. The layers below the earth’s surface could be mapped by sending sound waves—dynamite charges work nicely in unpopulated areas—into the earth and then recording their reflections with a geophone. As it happened, autocorrelation could detect pitch as well as oil, and Hildebrand, who had taken some music courses, turned his engineering skills toward pop.

Here at The Functionality, we're intrigued that tools for mapping space are being used to tweak the pop charts. 

For more on Autotune, Jace Clayton (better known as DJ /rupture) runs down his top-ten faves in this "Auto-Tune Appreciation Starter Kit." The list includes Cher, North African pop, and T-Pain.