The Gregory Brothers are garnering millions of views with Auto-Tune the News, a series of online videos in which they perform alongside TV news clips altered with the Auto-Tune vocoder effect. (YouTube)

You don't have to like Auto-Tune to be a fan of Auto-Tune the News. Even if you nurse a distinct hatred for the ubiquitous pitch-shifting software, you might make an exception for the songs of Brooklyn musicians Michael and Evan Gregory. Indeed, millions of tongues are LOLing on YouTube over their postmodern news operas.

Two qualities distinguish Auto-Tune the News from the usual YouTube content: it's actually funny, and the hit counts are astronomical.

Simply put, Michael and Evan use video editing and audio processing to transform news anchors into urban contemporary singers. Then they insert themselves into the footage to add their own subversive content. The best way to understand the appeal of Auto-Tune the News is simply to watch some episodes — there are five as of this writing; I recommend #2. (If you have trouble making out the lyrics, transcripts are available under the "more info" links.)

Two qualities distinguish these videos from the usual YouTube content; they're actually funny, and the hit counts are astronomical. These files have been accessed over three million times.

The young men with green chroma-key halos trading raps with anchors like Sean Hannity and Katie Couric are brothers. Evan is the eldest; Andrew (the bearded correspondent) lands in the middle; and Michael is the youngest. They share three family traits: heavy-lidded eyes, aristocratic noses and lean frames. The lone female in the videos is Sarah Fullen Gregory, who is married to Evan. All four perform together in a band called (with 75 per cent accuracy) The Gregory Brothers. They are not a comedy act.

"The sound that we have as a quartet is an old-school soul retro sound with a lot of folk influences," says Evan. So how did these earnest musicians find themselves at the helm of an online comedy juggernaut?

Members of the Gregory Brothers, clockwise from left: Andrew Gregory, Michael Gregory, Sarah Gregory and Evan Gregory. (Gregory Brothers)

"Sometimes [I write] comedy stuff because honestly, I just run out of ideas for a serious song," Michael says. "You write two or three love songs in a row, like O.M.G., and you don't feel like writing another one, so you write about space people."

Whether the material is satiric or genuine, Michael is a fearless performer. He was one of over 12,000 people who showed up to audition in Atlanta, Ga., for the seventh season of American Idol. Michael sang a painfully direct soul number called I Wanna Love You. (Watch him compete – for the 14 seconds he was allowed.) "I kind of did expect what happened, which was they put me on the blooper reel," Michael says. Not that he cared – he was on a three-month tour with his brothers.

The trick to Michael's comedy is that he looks like he should be insecure – but he isn't. He just needed a venue where there was no one waiting in the wings with a hook. In September 2008, he uploaded a video about the U.S. vice-presidential debates called Debate Highlights – in Song and Dance to YouTube. With low-budget video effects, Michael had inserted himself into a debate against John McCain. In a suit and tie, with his sober glasses, Michael could almost be a young Republican due for the barber. But he delivered his platform by rapping over urban contemporary grooves.

In addition to being a singer, Michael is also an accomplished recording engineer, and he gave his vocals the so-called Auto-Tune effect. Auto-Tune is an audio processor that can detect and correct vocal pitch on the fly. But Auto-Tune can also be used to overdrive the sound, and when pitch changes too fast for the human voice are edited in, the singing robot is born. The most popular song of Cher's career, Believe, is often credited for the explosion of this technique. Since then, it has crossed over into R&B and rap — singer T-Pain unleashed a choir of synthetic vocalists that occasionally includes Lil' Wayne, Kanye West and Akon. (There is a controversy over whether the effect on Believe was generated by Auto-Tune software, a vocoder, a DigiTech Talker, or a combination of all three. Incidentally, Michael Gregory uses both the Auto-Tune plug-in from Antares and the Melodyne plug-in from Celemony with Logic audio editing software to create his tracks.)

Michael Gregory knew that urban contemporary music was funny, but he had a much bigger target when he made Debate Highlights. By appearing to address Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Michael carjacked American politics itself and changed the radio station while the driver nodded along in approval. The stunt was irresistible, and an audience began to build. Michael knew, however, that his window of opportunity was narrow. To make future efforts show up in search engines, he would have to act fast.

Evan Gregory performs alongside U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in a screen shot from the Auto-Tune the News series. (YouTube)

"The vice-presidential debate highlights we had to do and repost in the same night as the debate, which is really hard to do it all in one night," he says. That's when Evan became involved.

"If you're one of the only reactions to the debate that's out there, a lot of traffic will come your way," Evan says. "So we kind of work together as a team to do the projects."

With every debate, the numbers kept getting higher – until the content itself was well-known enough to take on a life of its own. Everyone wanted to be first to share the Gregorys' videos among friends on Facebook.

"It's a new concept, and the music is really catchy," says Evan. "The other thing is because there's this homemade quality to the videos and we take found content and our new jokes and mash them up, people have fallen in love with our process, or at least what they consider to be our process."

Two general camps formed – people wanting the brothers' help with Auto-Tune and people offering to fix their hazy chroma-key effects. What hasn't formed is a major political discussion. Michael and Evan's lyrics on Cuba, gay marriage, global warming and the wars on drugs and terror may indicate a left-of-centre position, but in comedy, it does no good to form alliances. Who knows which party might be the target of the next cream pie.

"It's not about putting our positions out there," says Evan. "It's more about skewering the personalities that take part in the media cycle or the political process."

Auto-Tune the News is a triple threat: well-produced music, wide-ranging material and confident performers who can work fast under pressure.

Millions of viewers later, the formula is paying off. Now, instead of getting the bum's rush from a reality show, Michael can halt Hillary Clinton's press conference to take a call from his grandmother.

Who wouldn't want that kind of power?

Dwight Friesen is a web developer at CBC.