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Perfect Pitch for Those Without It
airrage writes "Sometimes technology is a good thing, and sometimes it ends up in a hardware device called an autotuner. Apparently, it allows real-time pitch correction. They are actually being used at concerts. I think we all realize that some singers sound different -- much different -- live than they do on CD's, but this just seems so, so, what's the word: fake?"
perfect pitch is NOT the ability to sing in tune, it is the ability to know the pitch of a tone w/o a reference.
It's overuse and misuse. I have a copy of Auto-Tune 3 (yes, a REAL bought and paid for copy) but you'd never know it from listening to the music I record.
Here's a real-life scenario: I'm recording a singer who is pretty good but there's one note that they can't quite hit today. We could scrap the session and do it again later - even good singers have trouble hitting all the notes all of the time - but that will cost the client hundreds of $$$. Alternatively I can fix the one note that's not quite there. I wouldn't try to correct every little shaky bit of intonation in the entire song, just the one that's really sour. What would you do?
Or how about this? Got a great bass player laying it down. Good tone, good part, one note played near the end of the neck is a bit off because the intonation of the instrument needs adjusting. Would you fix the note with Auto-Tune or scrap the session ($$$) and ask the bass player to get the intonation fixed? I'd do the expedient thing - fix the note AND ask the bass player to get some work done on the instrument before the next session.
What drives me crazy is the obvious warbling and perfectly pitched effect you hear on all of the modern pop and Nashville country CDs. Nobody can sing like that, it sounds like a machine. That's misuse of what can be a very subtle and powerful tool.
"Clean up the air and treat the animals fair" - Captain Beefheart
A vocoder generates a fixed frequency wave (pulse, sine, whatever) at the correct pitch and then modulates that wave with the input signal. The result is that when the input frequency changes, you hear a very sudden, abrupt change in the output pitch, much like the voice is being generated by a music keyboard. From a pitch perspective, it basically is.
A pitch correction does a frequency estimator on the original input signal, then determines the nearest correct frequency for a valid note in the current key, determines how far to shift it towards the correct pitch (you don't shift it all the way to avoid flattening vibrato completely), and finally uses a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to actually shift a chunk of audio up or down in pitch the appropriate amount.
Vocoding is to pitch correction as AM Radio is to Ogg Vorbis. Yeah, they both end up doing similar things when viewed at a high level, but they do them in such radically different ways that they don't sound anything alike.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
Cher really abused it on that "Believe" song.
Nearly. It was a vocoder, but the end effect is very similar. The main practical difference is that vocoders can be used to make anything sound in pitch, and even let people sing chords rather than single notes. That and they've been around far longer. Hmm, maybe I should submit them as a new technology for a Slashdot article...
From Antares' site:
Female singer before
and after processing.
Lots more at the product info page.
From Discover magazine, a biology study indicates the tonal orientation of their languge gives a large number of them perfect pitch. It also indicates that perfect pitch can be learned given the appropriate environment. So while the parent post may look like a troll, the moderator didn't do their research.
ehintz
But then again, this isn't anything new in the music world; people have been altering pitch in the studio for years, even before "autotune".
This is true. The version of the Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" that everybody knows is actually a splice of two different takes. One of the take's tempo was faster than the other, so they had to slow one down and then adjust the pitch to make the two takes line up. This has nothing to do with Lennon's vocal performance, but it just goes to show that pitch adjustment has been happening since at least the 60s.
"I can detect an autotune-processed track within seconds of hearing it, due to the utter piano-like lack of pitch sensitivity and expression."
Must be listening to ancient software.
The software I use for fixing tuning issues -- and more to the point for creative avenues of doing something NEW with the sound -- is pretty indistinguishable from the real thing.
Old Autotune would be something folks would be something folks just programmed a tuning and let it go. I still don't like Antaries version of the Autotune but they have make a LOT of improvements in their version of it. The last ProTools studio I was in didn't even use the hard pitching algs -- they penciled in the bad notes. Pull up a grid and ya moused the stuff to what you need.
Better softwares like Melodyne do this MUCH better. Instead of screwing with the pitch of the entire word or otherwise, it finds the center of the pitch and pops it to the right spot. The word still sounds natural. Its smart enough to know how to tie sounds together so you don't have major jumps in the sound and they've got great algs to make sure the timbre is consistant in the move -- of course anything more than a semitone or two is going to be more noticable, but its still better than anything the generic autotune can do.
Its nice enough that you can add or remove vibrato naturally as well as pitch widths...
I've heard several folks who've claimed to be able to hear ANY autotune alg in use and be fooled by this software. The only reason Antares is still in business is because of the name...Melodyne is the software to beat and it just keeps getting better (Version 2.0 was released this week...haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet).
Ok, first off, I saw Shania Twain perform at the superbowl last year on TV and I can say she absolutely, positively, was NOT using an auto-tuner. I mean, why use an auto tuner when you're lip synching?
Secondly, they're not the black magic that the article makes them out to be. I've used one many times in a recording setting and they can't make a bad singer into a good singer. They can make a slightly out of tune singer sound in-tune and that's about it. Plus they're hard to use. If you set the tuning speed to fast, they'll flatten out your vibrato. If you set it too slow, bad notes will get through. They have limited usefulness.