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.
Early versions will adjust the pitch, future versions will go beyond that! Just think, someday I can "sing" the words along with the music, and due to their nifty software it will sound exactly as if I had the CD in.... Wait, if it sounds the same, why not just put in the CD? Doesn't this whole thing take some of the point out of it? I mean, bad singing included, that's the fun of Karaoke... laughing at people who try to sing along but suck...
Wait, this has already happened.
and all the others now using auto-tune boxes as an effect. You can set these things to quantize to a diatonic scale and just "snap" from one pitch to another not allowing any slide at all. I'm sure you've heard it.
I'm also sure you've not heard it when the thresholds are set a little looser.
It was kinda neat the first time I heard it, but jeeze.. it's getting old.
Half the reason for going to Karaoke is laughing at how bad your friends and other bar patrons are at singing. If it corrects this for you, ya might as well just play the jukebox and lip-sync...
-vic
Thus, bad karaoke is still bad karaoke. Good for all of us with pitch, we'll still impress. :)
Adjusting the voice on the fly is going to be a different problem -- it would probably be easiest solved by hard coding the Hz at each given moment of a song (with some fuzzy boundaries) and then running the mic input through.
But what fun is that? How can we be impressed by the guys who can sing A-Ha's 'Take on Me' if everyone can do it?
Sure, this corrects people who are off-key, but what about those of us who intentionally change notes or tempo? I don't want to have my choices vetoed by vocoder.
I mean, seeing how bad some people sing? I've only been to a Karoke bar once or twice, but that was certainly part of the fun: Seeing someone up there completely butchering "Hotel California".