T-Pain’s appropriately-titled 2005 debut album, Rappa Ternt Sanga, birthed two of the 35-year-old singer’s greatest hits to this day, “I’m Sprung,” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper).” The album was released at a transitional time in hip-hop by the mid-2000s, gangster rap was on the outs (much to the dismay of purists, who had a whole hell of a lot more disappointment in store in that regard in the years to come), and the newly-surfacing crop of artists were starting to blur the lines distinguishing rap from R&B, and R&B from pop. His imaginative adaptation of Auto-Tune in the mid-aughts heralded a new dawn in hip-hop music, and his ubiquitous influence can be seen in the musical stylings of many of today’s most popular artists across all genres. It was T-Pain’s pivotal use of the technology as a stylistic tool, rather than a mere aid to sharpen up flawed vocals, that pushed the vocal effect further into the mainstream and prompted others to experiment with it, as well. When T-Pain’s fateful track, “I’m Sprung,” made its way onto the world’s airwaves in 2005, Pain cemented himself as the forefather of Auto-Tune and unknowingly spawned what would soon become one of the most divisive motifs in hip-hop. Kevin Winter/Getty Images Enter T-Pain (2005) Auto-Tune soon phased the vocoder out of fashion and was adopted by artists in all corners of music, building up to the Auto-Tune craze that would soon ensue. To put it in Layman’s terms, the difference between the two technologies is that the vocoder eliminates all traces of the singer’s natural timbre for an entirely synthetic sound, whereas the robotic sound that can be achieved via extreme use of Auto-Tune is the result of correcting pitch from one note to another. The vocoder, invented in 1928 to encode speech during World War II, was adopted by musicians (including several west coast hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg and 2Pac), in the late 20th century to create a synthetic, robot-voice sound. The song went on to become the iconic singer’s top-selling single, and despite Taylor's best efforts, pushed Auto-Tune into the limelight. Cher's producer, Mark Taylor, tried to keep their use of the vocal-processing effect under wraps by insisting to no avail that it was the work of a vocoder instead. The first and perhaps most infamous implementation of the technology was Cher’s 1998 hit comeback single, “Believe,” which struck gold in its utilization of the tool and served as then-struggling Cher’s much-needed Hail Mary. Considering that prior to Auto-Tune’s invention, the process of landing the perfect take of a song required recording it several times and splicing together the best parts, this creation made the recording process drastically more expedient. The premise of the invention was simple: by isolating entwined frequencies and allowing producers to tweak pitch while still preserving a voice’s tone, the tool could seamlessly correct a singer’s off-key or wavering notes, thus making it possible for them to nail a song in as little as one take. Andy Hildebrand introduced the revolutionary audio processor, Auto-Tune, in 1997, the music landscape was irreversibly transformed. Today, we’re diving into the history of the controversial, ever-evolving pitch-correcting software. Since its first iteration in the late ‘90s, Auto-Tune has, for better or for worse, turned into something of a Pandora’s Box.