While key ideas and values of posthumanism are still debated among scholars across both the humanities and technical disciplines, a certain type of posthuman sensibility has already been normalised in popular culture, a field that often moves much faster and flexibly than theory. Specifically, the increasing presence of human-machine cooperation in pop music allowed posthuman aesthetics, subjectivities, and languages, to infiltrate people’s everyday affective experience of popular culture.
This paper focuses on the specific case of Auto-Tune, a piece of voice processing software which has become the stand-in name for a whole range of production equipment. Although originally designed as a labor-saving device for dissimulated tonal correction and standardisation, Auto- Tune is now better known as a tool for deliberate distortion and modulation of the human voice through software mediation.
This mutation in the use of Auto-Tune offers a rich example of how the human and the machine reciprocally animate each other through productive cooperation. As the embodied voice is abstracted and rendered into computation, the singing subject is reconfigured and reconstituted with the machine, in a dynamic process where agency is not clearly owned, but flows, obfuscated, between the organic and the digital. Thinking of this process relationally, we could argue that this cooperation produces a posthuman subject, as the human is incorporated into a technical organism of conscious and nonconscious cognisers.
This assemblage of embodied organicity and computational abstraction produces an affective experience that puts us into contact with the alien agency of technological otherness, the computational recomposition of abstracted organicity through mathematical intuition.
This virtual embodiment of the human voice and its expressive signifiers affects the cultural framing of human-machine interactions, normalising the technological mediation of human emotion by producing a posthuman mode of feeling. This “contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital” (Clayton, 2009) can help us question, on an aesthetic dimension, the dualist human-machine dialectic that critical posthumanism has already problematised in theory.
