Last fall, for Weekend Edition's series on Music & Technology, Liane Hansen went to New York to feature the pitch-correcting software called Auto-Tune. Listeners may remember her own inglorious encounter with the software.
But while she was at Avatar Studios in Manhattan, she ran into a 22-year-old singer named Sabrina Scott, who was laying down tracks for her debut recording. Only a rough mix of her session made it to air, but listeners were curious as to who the singer was.
The music is polished up now, and Scott, now 23, has released her debut EP, called A New View. She says that Auto-Tune was used only sparingly on a small handful of notes.
"The truth is when you're making an album like this one, or an EP, you want to find a marriage between the aesthetic quality of the songs and the authenticity of the artist's voice," Scott says. "And in my case, this voice ...
"So yes, if we had a take where we captured the emotion of the song and we expressed what we were hoping to express, but there were one or two notes out of key that needed fixing, because the software is there, we used it. But other than that, we stayed really true to who I was as an artist and the voice that I wanted to present."
Hansen followed up with Scott, who recently graduated from New York University — and committed to recording A New View that very day.
"The money came from many years of savings, from babysitting and internships and the kindness of my grandparents and parents in certain cases," she says. "So I was very lucky to have the support of my family."
Click the link at the top of the page to hear the full interview with Sabrina Scott, starting around 12 p.m. ET on Sunday, May 17.
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