Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:47:13pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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12L: Geographies of Auto-Tune: Pitch Correction and Vocal Practice in Global Contexts Location: State Room West | |
| Presentation 1 | |
Geographies of Auto-Tune: Pitch Correction and Vocal Practice in Global Contexts Few if any technologies in the twenty-first century have so profoundly impacted the production of popular musics globally as Auto-Tune. From bedroom setups to Bollywood soundstages, digital pitch correction technologies have become part of everyday production practice and are taken for granted as a strategy of vocal mediation. However, pitch correction software and artists’ and engineers’ labor mediate the politics of embodied identities, historical lineages of local musical practice, and imaginaries of audiences in a globalized musical marketplace. Auto-Tune is a mobile, roving representation of the politics of vocal production in the twenty-first century, even as it carries its own material and political precedents. This roundtable emerges from an anthology-in-progress with interdisciplinary scholars who study pitch-mediation genealogies across cultural, industrial, and musical contexts. We ask: in which genres and traditions has Auto-Tune become a stylistic signifier, and which accepted modes of expression do these entail? How can a range of perspectives reveal Auto-Tune’s use as a mediator of vocal politics and affect? Panelists explore, in turn: Auto-Tune’s role in shaping French popular music, identity, and contemporary cultural politics; “saturation” metaphors for Auto-Tuned voices that originated in oil-sounding technologies, explored through Cape Verdean Mayra Andrade’s music videos and transoceanic collaborations; gendered geographies of Auto-Tune in Morocco’s global rap marketplace; the use of Auto-Tune live in American megachurches; technologies of cover-ups and orchestral support in India’s contemporary mainstream vocal music industries; and interviews with Puerto Rican producers who achieve international visibility by adopting Auto-Tune conventions while cultivating a distinctive Puerto Rican aesthetic. | |
