[pcsanwald]

The ubiquity of auto-tune is particularly interesting because most people don't seem to have a lot of pitch sensitivity. Tons of very famous recordings are slightly out of tune and no one seems to complain, ever.

I'd imagine its popularity is more due to convenience rather than demand.

[amelius]

I think slightly out of tune often sounds better (more natural) in all genres except perhaps classical.

[mrob]

The one genre I can think of where perfect tuning is essential is barbershop music. The defining feature of the genre is chords sung with just intonation and no vibrato, which makes it easy to hear if any of the singers are out of tune. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbershop_music#Ringing_chord...

[baddox]

A lot of barbershop albums, probably most recent ones, are pretty heavily pitch-corrected. It doesn’t bother me that much, but I almost always prefer live barbershop recordings.

[contravariant]

Depends what you mean by "out of tune". How good a chord sounds is determined by the ratio of frequencies, not if all the notes fit 'perfectly' in some scale. In fact you can't even create a scale where all chords are perfectly in tune.

[pcsanwald]

all tuning is relative, of course, but my comment is thinking about singers or horn players that play consistently sharp, for example.

[pcsanwald]

agreed, but even in classical music it doesn't really bother me that much sometimes, some of my very favorite string players have occasional intonation issues (who doesn't?). And think of all the jazz records with an out of tune piano!

[EADGBE]

Peterson's "Sweetened Tunings" has made a whole sub-genre out of this.

[the_cat_kittles]

yea, sometimes i think the lack of perfection helps you focus on the bigger ideas. like how making 2d plots with the xkcd style kind of tells your brain to ignore little noise in the line. same with tuning and tempo and whatnot- not every not is perfect, so your ear ignores the little imperfections. of course, if there is too much imperfection, signal to noise ratio gets out of whack. but i think this is part of the reason lots of music has drones, melocially, or texturally (think indian classica, jazz cymbal or brushes, etc) ...it kind of thresholds alot of non-musical noise.