【单选题】
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 (平庸的) 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 calledAuto-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 (颤抖的) 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 widespreadAuto-Tune is."
Auto-Tune’s inventor is a man namedAndy Hildebrand, who worked for years interpreting seismic (i.e. relating to earthquakes) 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 worked on 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 (搞砸了的) notes, saving them the expense and trouble of having to redo sessions. The first time common ears heardAuto-Tune was on the immensely irritating 1998Cher hit "Believe." In the first verse, whenCher sings "I can’t break through" as though she’s standing behind an electric fan, that’sAuto-Tune - but it’s not the way Hildebrand meant it to be use
D、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 Hildebran
D、"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 automate
D、"I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that," he says.
Like other trends set byCher, the creative abuse ofAuto-Tune quickly went out of fashion, although it continued to be an indispensable part of the engineer’s toolbox.But in 2003, T-Pain (Faheem Najm), a little-known rapper and singer, accidentally stumble onto theCher effect whileAuto-Tuning some of his vocals. "It just worked for my voice," says T-Pain in his natural Tallahassee accent. "And there wasn’t anyone else doing it."
Since his 2005 first album, T-Pain has sent a dozen mechanically cheery singles into the Top 10. He contributed to four nominated songs at this year’s Grammys on FeB、8, 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 adjustAuto-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 withAuto-Tune on his new recor
D、"I know [Auto-Tune] better than anyone," says T-Pain. "And even I’m just figuring out
网考网参考答案：A
网考网解析：
[线索词] Auto-Tune; trendy Cher [定位处] 第五段首句 [解析] 该句提到，就像雪儿引发的其他潮流一样，这种滥用Auto-Tune制造出来的特效很快便不再流行。题干中的the craze for Auto-Tune与该句提到的the creative abuse of Auto-Tune对应，trendy Cher started与trends set by Cher对应。[A]项中的faded soon是对quickly went out of fashion的同义转述，故答案为[A]。 对比处设题。本题需要理解craze与creative abuse、faded与went out of fashion之间的同义转述。 document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>
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