“You n—– singing too much/Get back to rap, you T-Paining too much…This is death of auto-tune, moment of silence”-Jay-Z, “D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune),” 2009

“We’re here to raise awareness about Auto-Tuner abuse. I think over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of good musicians being affected by this newfound digital manipulations of the human voice, and we feel enough is enough.” – Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), 2009

On Dec. 6, 2005, T-Pain released his debut album, “Rappa Ternt Sanga.” Bolstered by two top-10 singles—“I’m Sprung” and “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)”—the album helped T-Pain become an iconic figure in American music due to his innovative use of Auto-Tune, a vocal manipulation software that can change the pitch of a singer’s voice. In the years following “Rappa Ternt Sanga,” T-Pain would become many things: an app (“I Am T-Pain,” which lets users approximate Auto-Tune on their phones), a meme, a joke. He would also become, arguably, the most influential popular musician of the past decade. By opening himself to ridicule, T-Pain gave the first push for a major shift in hip-hop and R&B, one that continues today.

Auto-Tune was invented by a geophysicist, Andy Hildebrand, in 1996. Hildebrand was working in the oil industry, using sound waves to create subterranean maps used to help companies identify promising drilling spots. The technological and mathematical mechanisms used in this process could also detect pitch; Hildebrand, a classically trained flautist, turned his attention to the music industry.

Though Auto-Tune would become associated with vocal distortions, producers first used it to correct imperfections. When downloaded into the Pro Tools recording software, Auto-Tune moves vocal aberrations to what it determines to be the intended pitch.

Among Auto-Tune’s settings is the option to change the speed at which it moves a recorded vocal to its “correct” pitch. The faster Auto-Tune makes these adjustments, the less natural, or human, it sounds. It’s the sonic equivalent of decreasing a film’s frame rate: Motion becomes fragmented as the gradual slides we make when moving between pitches disappear.

When the adjustment speed (known as the “retune speed”) is set to zero, this fragmentation produces the robotic sound that has become one of the defining innovations of 21st century popular music.

This effect was introduced through Cher’s 1998 single, “Believe.” The song’s producers, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, insisted they produced the effect with a vocoder—an early ancestor of Auto-Tune—to keep their secret safe.

Slowly, other producers discovered the “zero retune” setting, including Rodney “Darkchild” Jenkins, who used the effect on a remix of the 1999 Jennifer Lopez song, “If You Had My Love.”

The song, which was Lopez’s debut single, would launch her music career, and grab the ear of an aspiring rapper from Tallahassee, Fla. Faheem Najm, soon to be known as T-Pain, became obsessed with the zero retune sound, and spent years trying to recreate it.

After a two-year hunt, T-Pain spent an entire day testing every vocal effect on his computer. He eventually happened upon Auto-Tune and began recording with it.

In 2004, T-Pain signed with Akon’s Konvict Muzik label and released his first single, “I’m Sprung,” in August 2005. The song describes a tumultuous relationship with a woman who wins the narrator’s heart and wants to keep it. Despite its lyrical content, the song is light to the touch, prominently featuring a harp and vocal harmonies that recall ’90s R&B groups like Boyz II Men and Jodeci. The only hints of trouble come through T-Pain’s use of Auto-Tune on the verses, which projects the ambivalence contained in the lyrics.

He followed the single with “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper).” Both songs reached the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, as would his next two singles, “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” and “Bartender,” from his second album, 2007’s “Epiphany.”

In 2007, T-Pain became a household name, appearing on nine top-20 singles. With ubiquity came controversy, as Auto-Tune (and T-Pain, by extension) became a convenient symbol for what was “wrong” with pop music. Not only did it disguise one’s ability (or lack thereof) to sing on pitch, critics said; it distorted the natural quirks of the human voice. This qualified as blasphemy for those who worshipped the classic rock canon, which, particularly in the late 1980s and 1990s, defined itself in opposition to the supposedly “artificial” nature of pop music.

With the release of Kanye West’s 2008 album “808s & Heartbreak,” Auto-Tune would begin on the path to redemption, but, at the moment, T-Pain was a punchline. He continued to experience commercial success, but now that his secret was spreading throughout the pop world, his signature effect would suffer from overexposure and leave him scrambling to maintain his relevance. He would release two more albums, 2008’s “Thr33 Ringz” and 2011’s “rEVOLVEr,” before taking a hiatus from commercial releases that would end with his 2013 single, “Up Down (Do This All Day).” His next album, “Stoicville: The Phoenix,” is set to be released on Friday.

While most were laughing, West was listening. He enlisted T-Pain for “Good Life,” from his 2007 album “Graduation,” which, like the work that preceded and followed it, would do much to reshape hip-hop’s relationship with outside genres and cultures—this time, top-40 pop and electronic dance music.

A buoyant, swaggering ode to the spoils of celebrity, the song made use of T-Pain’s great talent: the hook. Freed from biological constraints, T-Pain’s voice sits between the instrumental and vocal tracks, issuing the directive, “Now throw yo’ hands up in the sky,” as if programmed by Hello Kitty. The specific strain of energy he captures on this song—and throughout his work—allows him to operate as an agent of both stability and chaos, something like a musical sine wave.

Sensing potential in this new mode of vocal expression, West returned a year later with his most divisive album, “808s & Heartbreak,” on which he sang—exclusively—and often used Auto-Tune to manipulate his voice. But where T-Pain used the tool as a stimulant, West turned it into a depressant. Recording the album in the wake of his mother’s death, West, unsurprisingly, sounds despondent. Auto-Tune’s rapid pitch changes create the effect of emotional instability.

While “808s” would divide West’s fans and critics, few could have anticipated the seismic shift that was about to occur in hip-hop and R&B, one that would bring the genres closer together than ever before.

Three months later, Drake would release his breakout mixtape, “So Far Gone.” Though Drake didn’t use Auto-Tune (at least, not in as extreme a fashion as West and T-Pain), he staked out a middle ground between hip-hop and R&B, singing and rapping with a vulnerability that subverted the former genre’s hyper-masculine conventions.

Kid Cudi would occupy a similar space with his debut album (though his first mixtape, “A Kid Named Cudi,” and single, “Day ‘N’ Nite” preceded “808s”), “Man on the Moon: The End of Day,” released in September 2009. Like Drake, he blurred the line between rapper and R&B singer, but his music also took cues from the theatrical self-pity of emo and pop-punk lyrics. (“I’ve got some issues that nobody can see/ And all of these emotions are pouring out of me” he moans on “Soundtrack 2 My Life.”)

There was little precedent for what these three were doing, but T-Pain was the spark that set them in motion. West may have redirected his innovative use of vocal technology, but without T-Pain, “808s” likely never would have happened.

From there, the floodgates opened.

The Weeknd released his debut mixtape, “House of Balloons,” in March 2011, taking cues from West, Drake, Cudi, post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees and indie-rock duo Beach House, among others. His version of R&B was tense, sinister and spacious, diverting sharply from the sensitive (musically, if not always lyrically) and sensual strand that dominated commercially in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Atlanta rapper Future widened the range of contexts to which Auto-Tune could be applied in hip-hop, using it in songs that dealt with everything from romantic infatuation (“Turn on the Lights,” “You Deserve It”) to drug dealing (“Karate Chop,” “Homicide”). Along with the likes of Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan, he helped Atlanta become a hotbed of innovation in hip-hop.

Whether or not they use Auto-Tune, many emerging artists from the city sing and rap (it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two) in ways that recall the jarring pitch fluctuations Auto-Tune creates. Thug, best known for “Lifestyle” (which he recorded with Rich Homie Quan and Birdman), and iLoveMakonnen, who broke out last year with the surprise hit “Tuesday,” often sound like their lungs are full of helium, wobbling between pitches with a spontaneity reminiscent of T-Pain.

While T-Pain’s influence has spread and mutated over the past decade, his imprint on popular music is undeniable. By using Auto-Tune as an instrument, rather than a tool, he created a new paradigm for vocal experimentation. Some blamed him for making pop music more homogeneous, but, in fact, he was doing the opposite.

When used to correct imperfections, Auto-Tune promotes a convergence toward precision. Vocals are treated as formulas that require an unchanging set of variables. When used as an instrument, Auto-Tune allows singers to express these formulas in new ways, or break from them entirely. By conditioning pop radio listeners for unconventional vocal styles, T-Pain created space for voices that would otherwise be marginalized.

In his wake, T-Pain has left a hip-hop and R&B culture that is weirder and looser than before. Music that was once dismissed as frivolous (Southern hip-hop, in particular) has come to be appreciated for for its ability to move and emote in new ways. Old ideas about authenticity—largely focused on lyrics rooted in realism and hardship—are falling by the wayside, replaced by an increasing acceptance of eccentric sounds.

Kanye West may receive most of the credit for Auto-Tune’s ripple effect on popular music, but T-Pain’s role should not be ignored. When “Rappa Ternt Sanga” arrived 10 years ago, some heard commercial R&B with a new twist, others heard the death of music. Few could have predicted it would start a revolution.