Auto-Tune the News

If you didn’t know, Auto -Tune is a software program that alters singers' voices to achieve perfect pitch and when used too much it makes people sound electronic.

Usually a software that is used in the music industry and perhaps movies, it is now being used to present the news.

Auto-Tune the News, is a series of music videos on YouTube created and performed by the Gregory Brothers. The Gregory Brothers are Evan, Andrew, Michael, and Sarah Gregory (Gann 2009). They take real news broadcasts and edit them to make them funny and thus, more memorable.

Although the presentation of the news is hardly serious, it still projects the news and it is real news.
Mackey (2009) stated that they tried to mould speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Winston Churchill into contemporary pop songs, it can take a while for the lyrics to sink in, but once they do, it is hard to get these weirdly catchy songs out of your head.

That way, anyone watching the videos, whether they like politics or not, will retain some information of what is happening in the news or even in history.

As The Gregory Brothers once commented, “we’ve heard some very encouraging stories from teachers and other adults who have actually used the I Have a Dream video to refresh the speech for younger ears, with great outcomes.” (Gann 2009).

It may also a form of multimodal texts that students will encounter in their educational environment (Walsh 2006). As stated by Walsh (2006), there is an increased merging of communication within and outside educational environments.

I find Auto-Tune the News very intriguing as it helps to provide news to an audience that normally would show no real interest in it but through these videos they at least are aware of certain topics. Maybe even enough to fuel further discussions about it in the future.

According to Plotkin (2010) millennials are too busy watching videos on YouTube and they typically don’t care who made those videos, or if they have an agenda, as long as the video is entertaining. Therefore, viral videos do have a have significance in presenting news to their viewers no matter the form.

Featured below is a video from the “Auto-Tune the News” series.



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References
Mackey, R 2009, ‘Making the News Sing,’ The Lede, 29 April, viewed 10 November 2010, < http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/making-the-news-sing/>.

Gann, P 2009, Special Interview with “Auto-Tune the News” Creators, The Gregory Brothers, Original Sound Version, viewed 10 November 2010, < http://www.originalsoundversion.com/special-interview-with-auto-tune-the-news-creators-the-gregory-brothers/>.

Plotkin, T 2010, ‘Marketers Need to Understand the Power of Viral Videos,’ Green Buzz Agency, 9 February, viewed 10 November 2010, < http://www.greenbuzzagency.com/marketers-need-to-understand-the-power-of-viral-videos>.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The 'textual shift': examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.