It's funny how we all know this type of technology exists, but we never stop and find out the backstory of why and how it came to be. Great article, but depressing in that I don't understand 50% of the content and am unlikely to ever do so, despite having two friends in the geo business - one collecting the data and one interpreting it.
"When we asked him to provide a simple explanation of what happens, computationally, when a voice signal enters his software, he opened his desk and pulled out thick stacks of folders, each stuffed with hundreds of pages of mathematical equations."
This is utter nonsense. The math in the patent would fit in a Tweet. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5973252A/en
Did anyone else notice that in the figure with caption "A rendering of the Auto-Tune interface; via WikiHow", there's a lynda.com watermark in the lower bottom right corner of the screen? The screenshot used for the illustration must've been taken from a lynda.com video course.