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Pitch Perfect Karaoke
BuffJoe writes "The folks paid to make newer and improved karaoke machines have discovered a way to make even the most tone deaf singers sound great with a new technology for perfect-pitch karaoke!"
Make your cracks about Karaoke if you like, but read the article- there are hooks
for scoring singing, correcting pitch, and more. Should also make those Karaoke parties a little
more tolerable.
Digidesign's Pro Tools studio softwarehas had it for longer than the Antares has been around. I think the first mac versions did it. Hence the careers of most MTV staples.
For example, if you know what to listen for (hard 'edges' to notes on vocals) you can hear it all over Britney's music. It's also being used as a vocoder-type effect (synth filtered by voice) on some recordings. The song on Kid Rock's hit CD that he sang on (it was country sounding) used it extensively.
This product was based on the research of Roger Dannenberg, who had auto-accompaniment working years ago. Send him an email if you're interested in working on something similar; he has lots of code he can throw at you and he might want to collaborate.
There's also a team in Spain developing Voice Impersonator Karaoke technology.
Now singers can morph their own bland and off-key voices into a full rich Elvis (or anyone else for whom a digital voice template has been computed). Why be yourself, when you can be The King!
>;k
MIT's Vercoe, who lauded Taito for finding a way to bring the sound synthesis technology to market, said pitch correction with Csound had been demonstrated long ago. It could even convert a spoken voice into melody, in real time.
"It's in the technology. You just have to switch it on," he said.
This makes me think that Vercoe did NOT ship the pitch correction "switched on." My suspicion is that this is due to IVL's patents. IVL is a Vancouver, BC company that has been marketing formant-preserving pitch shifters for quite some time now. IVL's technology is licenced by Digitech and TC Electronics, among other companies. One of IVL's patents makes claims on the idea of pitch shifters that automatically harmonize and correct pitch.
Personally, I think that IVL's claims in this area are somewhat tenuous. They have taken a pitch-shifting algorithm that they did not come up with (the algorithm in question was originally from a Computer Music Journal article in the late 1980's), and added a few features that ARE obvious to those "skilled in the art." Still, it sounds like Vercoe didn't want to take any chances. It seems like Vercoe provided a pitch output from the pitch shifter, and let Taito do what they want with it. Nice way to sidestep any legal issues.
Antares uses the same basic algorithm as IVL. Both companies have their own proprietary pitch detection algorithms.
It is interesting to see that Extended Csound is still up and running. I thought that it was pretty much dead in the water since 1999 or so. Hmmm...
FYI "Thank you NASA" is from an episode of the Simpsons where bart, milhouse, ralph, and nelson form a boy band. Of course they can't sing, but there voices are fed through a box and "fixed". You know change tampo, pitch, etc.
so it is Ontopic, should be funny. Just because you don't get the reference does not make it off topic.
Now if I had said "The Simpson are going to antiartica...next year this year Brazil" that would of been an off topic simpson reference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This new machine proposes to take the engeneer's seat as well as the processing equipment's. It will most likely read a signal telling what pitch the singer should be at and analize the incomming signal from the mic and based on a comparison of the two shift up or down.
One problem I have always noticed with live, real-time pitch shifting (NOTE: not auto-correcting, simply pitch shifting) is there is a delay, a millisecond or two, but enough to be audible. Methinks adding all the analysis time into the mix will add a little more delay and the singing will sound off! Hopefully they'll get it running smoothly...even if it takes all the fun out of Karaoke.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
There has been many products like this over the past several years. One of the ones that I have had the opportunity to use was the Korg iH. It is based on the technology developed by IVL (a company from my home town of Victoria, BC, Canada. WOO!)
Anyway, way back when I was working at a music store in Victoria we got a few of these in. They never really sold very well, but were pretty amazing if you knew how to use them. Found a review of the iH on Google.
IVL does some very neat stuff. Check out their Web site.
For example, if you know what to listen for (hard 'edges' to notes on vocals) you can hear it all over Britney's music. It's also being used as a vocoder-type effect (synth filtered by voice) on some recordings. The song on Kid Rock's hit CD that he sang on (it was country sounding) used it extensively.
Popular songs that have used a vocoder effect with hard transitions between pitches:However, use of the vocoder on some other songs is more subtle. Sometimes, the vocoder's pitch is set halfway between the pitch the slut is actually singing and the pitch that her producers want her to sing, which produces a much less synthetic perception. (Following a single voice's pitch is straightforward: square-root the signal to restore the fundamental, apply a 4th order low pass filter to remove harmonics, and count sign changes. If you want to know more, mail me.)
Oops! I did it again. I just described how to do something that probably infringes a dozen patents worldwide.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's not how the Cher "Believe" effect was done. There was an article about it in Sound On Sound. It was done by alternating between the actual vocals and the vocals ran through a vocoder.
maru