Distortion and Auto-Tune®: How to Write Like a Human in the AI Era

Tuesday morning. October 21st. I was buckling my son, Noah, into his car seat for preschool and our car started playing Jazz Baby by Carol Channing. Her voice, that brassy rasp, hit something deep in my memory.

It reminded me of the cassette tape my parents used to wear out playing for my brother, Greg, and me as kids: Carol Channing reading Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? Grit, theatrical delivery, sugar on sandpaper.

Listening now as an adult, I heard her tone as a gentler echo of Louis Armstrong’s. Both singers using gravel to express feeling long before “distortion” became a musical term.

As my wife, Emily drove off to take Noah to school, I found myself thinking about how musicians, and now, all of us, use tools to walk the line between clarity and character.

Distortion Becomes Beauty

My whole world has been music. I’m an avid drummer and drum collector. I went to Berklee College of Music, worked for some of the most iconic names — Zildjian, Sennheiser, Neumann, Alesis, JBL, iZotope — and have had the honor of building and representing new instruments, equipment, and tools for creating and producing music.

In that world, I learned that over time, distortion made an aesthetic transition from being an accident to be fixed, into a desirable effect to be employed. On purpose!

Long before pedals and plug-ins, singers and players were already discovering the magic of pushing vocal chords and amplifiers past their limits. When a tube amp or a ribbon mic overloaded, it didn’t just break, it sang.

Nobody embodied that more than Jimi Hendrix. His guitar tone came from amplifiers gasping under the power of his playing. Overdrive and fuzz were paint colors and feedback was shading. Jimi used imperfection to tell the truth in a way an undistorted guitar could never.

Distortion is what happens when signal meets its limits. It’s audible evidence of energy. It's proof that someone cared, and pushed it. Eventually, we stopped trying to eliminate it. We designed it.

Auto-Tune and the Pursuit of Perfection

Fast-forward a few decades to another musical revolution, Auto-Tune. Distortion is on-demand chaos. Auto-Tune and other pitch-correction tools enforce order.

It corrects pitch, smooths edges, and reins in the unpredictable. At first, it was a quiet helper, a studio engineer’s secret for saving a good take. But then artists like Cher and T-Pain turned it into a deliberate aesthetic choice, bending the human voice into something new.

Used tastefully, pitch correction can be a powerful creative tool. It can save a performance with one or two flat or sharp notes leaving the power and emotion intact. But its ubiquity has changed music on a cultural and aesthetic level. What began as a tool of subtle assistance became the default.

And I can't stand it.

For me, the way we now use Auto-Tune, it hasn't created character. It has stripped away humanity. It taught us to prefer perfection over rawness and realness.

It has reduced vulnerability, the tiny variations that let a listener hear the beating heart behind the note. And the result is a generation of songs that sound flawless, but feel like ultra-processed foods: they look and taste like the real thing, but have little nutritional value.

I think it even extends to the effect all the processing has had on the role of music, the way we use music. Music's Job To Be Done has become background noise or audio wallpaper. When's the last time you sat and listened to music without doing something else?

The tool isn’t evil. The Auto-Tune people and Cher and T-Pain aren't bad people. It’s just that too many people forgot what imperfection means.

Studio to Strategist

Today I work as a consultant. Not just for music and audio companies, but I still love helping them. Along with my focus on product and strategy, I help clients embrace new tools and technologies, and especially generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT.

New tools can be amazing. It used to be that editing a recording meant literally cutting tape with a razor blade. Today, it takes a few clicks with a mouse. If a note was slightly flat or sharp, you had to redo the take. Now, pitch correction fixes it instantly.

We gain speed, precision, and control, but we also risk sanding away vitality.

LLMs like ChatGPT are a kind of Auto-Tune for thought. They take messy human expression and pull it onto the digital grid of grammar, clarity, and blind confidence (or worse, hallucination). The result is coherent and polished, but sterile.

Auto-Tune changed how voices sound, and AI is changing how voices read.

I wonder if maybe, the fusion—the creole—of human imperfection and AI precision is the voice of modern humanity.

Distortion tells us someone felt something. Auto-Tune tells us someone cared enough to perfect it. The tension between the two is what makes it art.

The same holds true for writing, design, and every creative act that now touches AI. The tool gives us structure. The human gives it soul.

Finding Your Voice in the Machine Era

As musicians, we come of age playing along to records. You put on a track and try to match it. Every hit, every note. I spent thousands of hours copying Steve Gadd, Steve Jordan, Neil Peart, Stewart Copeland, John Bonham, Al Jackson, Bernard Purdie, and countless others. Over time, imitation turns into instinct, and you start to develop your own voice as a player. Not totally unique. That's unrealistic. Informed by those heroes, but in some small way you start to sound like you.

That’s what I think about when I use AI. I’m a voracious user. I used it last night to look up a part number for my dishwasher. I used it last week to help me decide the pros and cons of using a snake or Drano (I'll spare you the details). I use it to prepare for calls, organize outlines, and edit drafts.

But the more I use it and see how others use it... I realize that developing your writing voice isn’t so different from learning an instrument. And it might be one of the most important skills of the AI age.

When we “play along” with the machine, at first we accept. Its pacing, its balance, its politeness. But if we keep pushing, if we keep distorting and shaping what it gives us, we start to hear our own phrasing. Our vocabulary emerges. The key, I think, is to keep rewriting until it's your voice coming through the algorithm.

For musicians and non-musicians alike, that’s the gig. Use AI as the records you practice with. It's a reference track to learn from, but not the performance you release. Let it help you find your rhythm and clarity, but don’t let it sing solo. The goal isn’t to sound like the machine; it’s to sound like yourself with the machine in the room.

In the analog era, authenticity meant untouched.

In the digital era, it means intentional.

Audiences know when something has been processed. You can tell when a photo's been filtered or retouched, right? The question isn’t whether you used AI. It’s whether the you in your work survived.

The stray metaphor, the irregular rhythm: those are our fingerprints.

Soon, nearly everything... words, images, songs, will be touched by AI. But the human doesn’t disappear unless we let it. We just move to a new place in the signal (or value) chain.

Maybe our job becomes the creative input: editing, effects, mixing, and production. Don't try to out-perfect the computer—you'll lose.

And just as we've built pedals to make electric guitars sound the way we want, we’ll need to build creative practices and tools that reintroduce friction, randomness, wit, doubt, and vulnerability into AI outputs.

I'm Hopeful

When I heard Carol Channing, her voice reminded me that character exists in the broken and imperfect frequencies. The same is true in our era of synthetic content.

Perfection, safeness, and confidence have become commoditized.

Being yourself is where value is.

Auto-Tune is a registered trademark of Antares Audio Technologies, LLC.