<table> </table> American Idol&#8221; had a Beatles week, a Mariah Carey week, even a Dolly Parton week.</p><p>But if the show really wants to be &#8220;current,&#8221; as judge Simon Cowell is fond of saying, it should have an Auto-Tune week.</p><p>What&#8217;s Auto-Tune? It&#8217;s pitch-shifting computer software that can make even mediocre singers sound like they know what they&#8217;re doing. So why keep telling contestants their performances are &#8220;pitchy&#8221;? Just run their voices through Auto-Tune, then see who sounds best.</p><p>Heresy, you say?</p><p>Hardly. It&#8217;s how it&#8217;s done in the real world.</p><p>The use of Auto-Tune, which was invented more than a decade ago, has exploded since Cher&#8217;s &#8220;Believe&#8221; brought an electronic warbling effect into the mainstream in the late &#8217;90s. While Auto-Tune is used today by artists such as T-Pain, Lil Wayne and Kanye West to create a similar effect, it is far more widely employed as a sort of singer&#8217;s safety net that&#8217;s meant to be invisible. But it&#8217;s capable of far more. In the February issue of Time magazine, assistant managing editor and music critic Josh Tyrangiel called Auto-Tune &#8220;Photoshop for the human voice.&#8221;</p><p>He wrote, in part:</p><p>&#8220;In a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound great. Better than great: note- and pitch-perfect, as if there&#8217;s been an unspoken tightening of standards at record labels, or an evolutionary leap in the development of vocal cords.&#8221;</p><p>But some artists are chafing at the high-tech trickery. They say using Auto-Tune to stamp out even the smallest vestiges of imperfection is giving today&#8217;s top-40 music all the uniqueness of a Pringle&#8217;s potato chip. At the Grammy Awards earlier this year, Seattle-based indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie wore light-blue ribbons on their jackets to protest the use of Auto-Tune.</p><p>&#8220;Over the last 10 years, we&#8217;ve seen a lot of good musicians affected by this newfound digital manipulation of the human voice,&#8221; said the group&#8217;s front man, Benjamin Gibbard. &#8220;And we feel enough is enough.&#8221;</p><p>Ditto for Neko Case, an alt-country singer who in 2006 said in an interview that Auto-Tune was, &#8220;for people like Shania Twain who can&#8217;t sing.&#8221;</p><p>She&#8217;s a bit miffed at Madonna, too.</p><p>&#8220;Just hit the note!&#8221; Case said. &#8220;You can do it, I have faith in you. But don&#8217;t leave the studio before you hit that (expletive) note!&#8221;</p><p>Case doesn&#8217;t claim to sing any better.</p><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not a perfect note-hitter either, but I&#8217;m not going to cover it up with Auto-Tune,&#8221; she said.</p><p>Almost everyone else does.</p><p>&#8220;I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, &#8216;How many people don&#8217;t use Auto-Tune?&#8217; and he said, &#8216;You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who&#8217;ve never used it in here,&#8217;&#8194;&#8221; Case said.</p><p>&#8220;When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody&#8217;s voice, I don&#8217;t take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you&#8217;ll hear a little bit of Auto-Tune and you&#8217;re like, &#8216;You&#8217;re too good for that. Why would you let them do that to you?&#8217;&#8194;&#8221;</p><p>Time&#8217;s Tyrangiel said the tool is simply too good not to use. He quotes a Grammy-winning engineer:</p><p>&#8220;You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it&#8217;s very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Let&#8217;s just say I&#8217;ve had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you&#8217;ll just run their voice through the box.&#8221;