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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.
"Thank you NASA"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Till the fat lady sings Karaoke!
The Antares Autotune has been available in rack form for quite a while... You'd be surprised how many rock acts lean a little too heavily on that device to clean up their live vocal performances...
hell Rosie O'donnel thanked the device in her christmas CD (although c'mon... in-tune/key bad music is still bad music)
*Shrug*
E.
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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...
but now everyone sounds like Stephen Hawking.
Eventually, he said, Taito may use the technology to reconfigure a singer's errant tones to the proper pitch, without otherwise altering the sound.
Forget Karaokee bars... They need to give these to many recording artists!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Wait, this has already happened.
Does this mean Britney won't have to lip sync anymore?
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
~Every time you are near?
~Just like me, they long to be
~Close to you
~Why do stars fall down from the sky
~Every time you walk by?
Everybody sing along! Kareoke is wonderful, ever since I got my Taito PerfectPitch 9000!
~Just like me, they long to be
~Close to you.
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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
girl bands with bigger breasts and more ass shaking!
:(
Although this sounds good at first, unfortunately, radio play will be swamped by the promotional music ventures
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?
Agreed. Karaoke is also supposed to be painful for the non-drinkers... this encourages drinking to numb the senses.
My sig sucks.
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.
At a recent comedy show, one of the acts had a one of the new Karaoke mics. This thing hooked directly to the PA system and the TV. It appears the device would display a few scenic pictures with typical power point style cuts between them. On the background they had two lines of text for the songs and it would highlight the words about the same time they should be sung. Once a song was finished, a score was shown which was always very high and appeard to have nothing to do with the talent of the singer. Aparently the device does allow new songs to be downloaded and it cost about US$500. If you want to comedy Karaoke, just remember its time to move on to something else when people start leaving the room.
What makes this any different than the machines Britney Spears, N'Stink, The Backdoor Boys, etc. use?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
Hearing people make fools out of themselves because they can't sing is part of the fun. At least for the first 10 min or so.
Aliens? Magnetic Rings?! Bah! Who needs that when we have
Yes, but can it fix Yoko Ono's voice?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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".
an intriguing behavioral trait involved in music perception and is defined as the ability to recognize the pitch of a musical tone without an external reference pitch
For example, a professor at my beloved alma mater was able to identify a pitch by referring to its frequency in Hz! The phrase describes someone at a different end of the musical spectrum than the idiots at which this product is aimed.
-jason
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
It's called "beer". If you have enough of it everyone sounds great at a karaoke party.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I've heard people express emotion from a guitar. I've heard it from a saxophone. I've heard it in the trombone solo in a slow jazz song. Hell, I've heard it from computer-synthesized tones (care to disagree? listen to track 9 of the album Ovalprocess by Oval. About halfway through is a combination of tones and disconnected sounds that is so expressive it amazes me every time I hear it).
There's some great voices out there, but it is not the sole vehicle for musical emotion. The scale may have a finite number of notes, but there are infinite variations possible.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
I have a karaoke story to tell,
There was a spell in my life about 2 years ago where I spent 6 months straight, 7 days a week, 7 martini's a night at what has been named the best karaoke bar in san jose by the san jose metro.
I popularized such forgotten hit's as Yes we have no Banana's by Spike Jones, To dream the impossible dream from
Man of La
Mancha, and brought new flair to Baby Got Back by Sir Mix Alot. In the
beginning I was a scared lone singer up on stage, my voice was terrible and I
was afraid.
I began to conquer my songs, one at a time. I would come in before any of the
other singers and start around 6:00. Each song I conquered represented a fear,
so in essence, I was conquering my fears.
I had a buddy that taught me the ways. Our whole thing was we were
"The Rat Pack" We got other singers into this clique and sort of set
the place on fire not only with our alcohol finely tuned voices, but with our
stage presence and showmanship as well.
The rat pack ended when Frank Sinatra had a kid. I miss those harmonic
days of bliss long since past.
So drawing from what I know makes or breaks a karaoke superstar, and applying
it to this comment, I honestly have to say that I don't think this will totally
help all people. You still have issue's with stage fright, crowd response,
the singers harmonic vocalizations and how well they dance around and put on a
show.
There is also somewhat of a joke in karaoke. Sometimes people TRY
and sing off key or tempo. It's what you do with a song that makes people laugh
or clap. Not just how well you sing.
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.
This can still have horrendous results.
This vs maybe adjusting the music, but also adjusting the sound of the singer so that the singer stays in tune.
This would be like the simpson rig, and would be truly impressive technology.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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?
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.
Defendent:
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Hilary Rosen, RIAA,
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[
What is the point of karaoke?
Having never done it myself I would guess thusly:
*to sing along to a famous/popular song, and in the process test your voice amongst a jury of your peers (most likely trashed of their nuts and laughing their asses off)
Introducing this technology to karaoke has no point.
You may as well mime along to the original CD
Here's how this thing works.
First, they play a song with the vocals removed so that someone can sing along, like standard karaoke.
Now, here's how this new technology works. Once that someone starts singing, their microphone is automatically turned off, and the original vocal tracks are added back in.
I hear it sounds great!
People who go out to Karaoke bars a lot (the regulars) tend to be fairly good singers, and the thing that keeps them coming back (and running up big drink tabs with their friends) is the chance to show off what good singers they are.
If the performances are masked to hide pitch errors, you negate the opportunity for those poor slobs to stand out from the crowd for three and a half minutes, and they will stop going, leaving the bar with nobody but the sloppy drunks who think they know how to sing "Friends In Low Places" but can't remember any of the verses.
The purpose of running Karaoke is to make money, not to make perfect music. The people considering buying a system like this might want to keep that in mind.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
However, a pitch bender isn't the solution I'd prefer for these people. Personally, I'm thinking tasers :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The only way I can see to do it is to assume the singer is wrong. Always. (This totally removes the ability for any deviation from "right", but how else could they know) At any given time, you know the Hz of note they're supposed to be hitting, so you just mod the vocal input to said Hz and you're good to go.
But there's gotta be some fuzziness to the algorithm to find the how the vocal input lines up with the actual rythym (nobody's going to be exactly on time, especially when you'd probably have to be sampling for it at an absurdly quick rate) as well as some fuzziness in the Hz itself...it's possible to recognize a bend, technically, you could stick it in there as long as you wound up on the right note. I think I'm just more interested in how the hell they think they're gonna get it to work decently enough to use...
But I'd still take it anyday for the transposition...very useful for all those songs that just need to be a half step lower/higher to fit in my range!