Who invented auto-tune?

“Dr. Andy” Hildebrand invented Auto-Tune pitch correction debuted more than two decades ago and it revolutionized the music landscape. Today, Auto-Tune is the gold standard of vocal processing, synonymous with the sound of modern pop and hip hop. But the tool that transformed the sound of singers everywhere emerged from the underground—literally.

The story begins back in 1989, when Dr. Andy, a brilliant geophysical engineer and mathematician, left a lucrative oil industry career to go to music school. A talented flutist who worked as a studio session player from the age of 16, Dr. Andy enrolled in Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where he studied composition. Unfulfilled by the “unnatural” sounds of digitized instruments, he built an algorithm that could seamlessly loop string samples, drawing on digital signal processing technologies he developed for geophysical applications.

Back in his oil industry days, Dr. Andy pioneered auto-correlation algorithms, which use seismic waves to map potential drill sites. In a breakthrough moment, he discovered he could apply those same algorithms to music, and he set out to write his own sampling software. In 1990, Hildebrand founded Jupiter Systems, the predecessor of Antares Audio Technologies, and launched the Infinity software sampler that year.