The Cher Effect

By Joe Brown

Saturday, June 7, 2008 | 2:14 p.m.

You've probably sensed it, too -- it feels oddly different here in Las Vegas. Something's missing.

Yes, Cher has left town -- without even leaving a Post-It note on the Colosseum door -- and she won't be back until her Caesars Palace gig resumes on August 12 (Sir Elton is at bat through June 22, and o' Bette is back June 24-July 20). But still Cher seems to keep popping up everywhere. It's what she does.

Even in The New Yorker magazine. The latest issue -- a juicy 134-page Summer Fiction issue, with new stories by Haruki Murakami, Annie Proulx, Mary Gaitskill and Vladimir Nabokov (in a first-time English translation), plus a deliciously mean review of the "Sex and the City" movie -- includes an interesting story about the pop music phenomenon known as Auto-Tune.

And wouldn't you know it, Cher is smack in the middle of it, as she always seems to be. Here's an excerpt:

The first popular example of Auto-Tune’s distorting effect was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” produced by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling. During the first verse, Auto-Tune makes the phrase “I can’t break through” wobble so much that it’s hard to discern. More successful is the gentler variation in the following line, “so sad that you’re leaving,” which highlights the software’s strength. Auto-Tune can produce a controlled version of losing control, hinting at various histrionic stations of the human voice—crying, sighing, laughing—without troubling the singer. It is notable that “Believe” ’s big chorus—“Do you believe in life after love?”—is delivered (mostly) in a full, human-sounding voice, with no robotic modifications. You can only feel so bad for a robot.

Before “Believe,” Auto-Tune was a closely held producers’ secret. (“They didn’t want to be known to manipulate the pitch of sound,” Hildebrand says.) After “Believe,” radical pitch alteration showed up repeatedly—in, among other places, a chunk of Madonna’s “Music” album, from 2000, Jamaican dancehall singles, and pop hits like JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late,” which uses a human-to-robot ratio very similar to that of “Believe.” In the manual accompanying Auto-Tune’s fifth-release version, the zero speed setting is described as “the Cher Effect.”