Every few years, media comes alive with discussion and debate around the use of technology in pop music, often focused on that most personal of instruments – the human voice.

Vocal manipulation is nothing new. It is ubiquitous and fundamental to pop music production – from self-harmonising on records in the 1950s, to autotune technology in the 90s and now millisecond precise editing, combining hundreds of individual vocal performances at the syllable level.

Generative AI is now prevalent in music as well. The use of platforms such as Suno are hugely popular. Suno can clone a voice within minutes. This can then be used to automatically generate a song with your voice, no matter how in tune or technically capable it originally was.

It can also take existing voices and remap them to other tunes. For example, take this mashup (below) of Cotton Eye Joe, “sung” by a digital Amy Winehouse.

But with the advent of this technology, is there a threshold of achievement before the individual voice is manipulated so much it is effectively removed altogether?

Here are six songs that exemplify how evolving technologies have changed the human voice since the 1950s.

1. Buddy Holly – Words of Love (1957)

The technique of double tracking takes two separate recordings of the voice and plays them together.

This simple technique, only achievable with the creative application of advances in........

© The Conversation