Rebecca Fiebrink GS Is T-Pain

If you’ve been listening to any popular music, like, at all in the past two years, chances are you’ve become acquainted with the musical miracle known as Autotune.And if you have an iPhone – and, we should note, we totally don’t expect you to, because that would be "assuming that everyone on campus comes from a privileged background and thus fit totally seamlessly into a dominant culture that further privileges privilege" – but if you have an iPhone, chances are you’ve heard about the I Am T-Pain App.You know T-Pain.  You love T-Pain (even if you won’t admit it).  And now (for the low, low price of $2.99), you ARE T-Pain.  You, and the thousands of other Americans who have downloaded the bestselling application since its debut in early September.What you might not know is that Rebecca Fiebrink, a Princeton graduate student in the Computer Science department, is one of the programmers responsible for turning your phone into a mobile recording studio.Fiebrink spent the summer in Palo Alto working for iPhone App studio Smule, which is the brainchild of Stanford Professor Ge Wang – a Princeton PhD who helped found the Princeton Laptop Orchestra during his time in New Jersey.(The campus connections don’t end there: Princeton Professor Perry Cook serves as the company’s advisor and consultant, while Spencer Salazar ’06 is the company's software architect.)T-Pain’s management approached the company with an idea for the app earlier in the year.  “Supposedly T-Pain’s kind of a nerd,” Fiebrink said.After getting approval from the company that licenses Autotune, Fiebrink and the Smule team got to work.“It was pretty interesting to figure out how to get [Auto-Tune] running on a phone,” said Fiebrink, who spends her time on campus researching music technology.  “There’s a big difference between a phone and professional recording hardware.  We had to put it in an interface, make it accessible, make it tie in to the T-Pain brand.”The end result couldn’t be much simpler.  Your (pathetic, off-key) voice goes into the iPhone's microphone, and Auto-tuned perfection comes out the device's speaker.  You can then email the finished product to friends, or post your masterpiece on Facebook.iTunes reviewer SurajKingIsrani says it best: I Am T-Pain “is like a mini 1000 dolla an hour rapper studio fur 2 bucks on ur fone sing talk it will always sound like a rapper a must buy.”Fiebrink, who also helps precept the undergraduate Music/COS course associated with the Laptop Orchestra, has taken on the role of campus ambassador for the app, giving demonstrations to friends and peers.  Her favorite song?“I like ‘Buy U A Drank.”  (Who doesn’t?)Fiebrink's parents have been the hardest sell.“They’re confused. They’re sure that it's great, but they don’t listen to music that has Auto-Tune, and don’t see the appeal to it,” she said.  Fiebrink herself admitted to preferring electronica and Canadian indie rock to T-Pain’s digi-dulcet tones.“I find it pretty funny,” she said.  “I work on stuff that I take far more seriously, but not that many people are ever going to really care.”