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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?"
It really comes as no surprise that music during concerts is altered to some extent. Most musicians are marketed not for their true musical talent, but for their attractiveness, or whatever other marketable features the record companies can exploit.
Apparently, it allows real-time pitch correction. They are actually being used at concerts.
Gee, Antares Auto-Tune has been out now for what, 6 years? I have a demo of it on my old OS9 Mac, and you can get a hardware version.
Usually it's used subtley to "clean-up" vocals but Cher really abused it on that "Believe" song. And also Madonna has used it recently on some song and Squarepusher (Red Hot Car). Like the article says it's used a LOT. So are a lot of other effects like reverb, compression, "aural exciters", etc.
It's just a tool like any other. The big-name recording industry completely abuses and sanitizes every track with endless re-takes, splices, effects, equalization, compression, etc., etc., this is just another way to make the tracks squeaky-clean, bland, and lifeless! If you like that "well-produced" sound this should be no problem.
I love this quote from a producer: "It's satanic.. Digital vocal tuning is contributing to the Milli Vanilli-fication of pop music. It's a shame that people just do it by rote.
Uhm, dude, the whole recording industry is satanic .. have you bought any
records lately? MilliVanilli-fication is the norm! I think if fans knew just
how awful most performers are without the technology, they'd wonder why the engineers name isn't on the front of the album!
PS: "Perfect pitch" to me means "being able to identify notes by ear without a reference" rather than "being able to sing on-key" (though I guess the two usually go together).
If you're going to an arena show to see a display of musicianship, expect to be disappointed.
If you just want to turn off your brain and have fun, then you will be right at home, because this is exactly what that kind of music is crafted for.
As somebody who actually HAS perfect pitch, I think these things are awful. 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". They just did it manually. This is just the next step.
Is it misrepresenting the abilities of the singer? Perhaps. I think people should just find musicians who have the looks AND the abilities.
There's plenty of good music that comes from people who can't sing. I can imagine technology like this greatly improving the diversity of music because now people who can't sing well naturally can still make good music.
I'd much rather listen to someone using one of these with original, creative music than listen to someone with great singing talent, but singing crappy cookie-cutter music.
So let's start putting this in the hands of the creative people who can't sing.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
They have perfect pitch.. ALL of them... I believe it has something to do with how their language is spoken.
yep, performances aren't about "perfection", they're about "interaction" with the artist.
if the artist hits a wrong note, forgets a word or whatever it usually doesn't ruin the performance. of course this is for the case of real artists who play their own instruments and write their own songs.
for the likes of Britney Spears etc. who have no talent or personality, "fashion-magazine perfection" is *all* they have, and their retarded audiences would no doubt demand nothing less.
Many singers are not always in tune. Go back and listen to some old Beatles albums like Revolver ... the auto-tuner would have a field day fixing all the slightly out of tune instruments and vocals. But would it make an obvious classic album more classic? Quite the opposite.
Part of the charm of vocals is that they are organic, even more so in a day and age where every single instrument can be synthesized and manipulated. Being in tune is overrated. You can't "fix" a Johnny Rotten scream. There's no point in auto-tuning rap music. Listen really carefully to some of your favorite singers. Not everything is a matter of being in tune. Some of it's confidence, "presence", knowing how to convey emotion through subtle details.
The worst thing that can happen as a result of auto-tuning is people start preferring cookie cutter, perfectly in tune vocals. That they start thinking N'Sync and Britney and Shania Twain are the apex of pop music. Thankfully I don't see this happening.
rather than to keep the artist in tune it can have it's uses.
I work part time for a small record company as a producer and I don't like using autotune to correct duff notes. If the take is crap I'll get the singer to do it again, and then splice together various different takes to make a final vocal. With a decent mike, nice valve-preamp and a decent (outboard, not software) compressor you can get most takes to sit well with each other. Luckily, the singers we have signed up to us were all chosen on talent first, looks second (they're hot, however) so often the time is taken on getting the feel 100% rather than getting notes in tune.
Where autotune can be used is as a special effect, with a slow re-tune rate and strict tuning you can get the voice to sound somewhat as if it were being put through a Vocoder (though it sounds subtly different, much less harsh and robotic). You can get the voice to do some really wierd things that you know voices aren't meant to do.
If used sparingly and only on the kinds of tracks that warrant that kind of sound AutoTune is the mutts nuts.
Cher's believe wouldn't have been the hit it was if it didn't have that quirky vocal (there's still some debate over whether this was autotune with extreme settings or a vocoder).
I am NaN
Hmm, if you play an electrical instrument, there are devices you can put in your effects loop that tell you whether you're in or out of tune and how much to correct. That doesn't seem so different from this, except that an inline tuner won't do the pitch shifting for you. It seems like this is just giving singers a capability that already exists for other musicians.
Except that you've just eliminated the need for musicianship in the vocalist. Now, basically, songwriting and backup bands are all that's important. (Hey.... Maybe this isn't such a bad thing after all. Freakin' prima-donna front men...)
The technology is already in use to create pop acts and has been used throughout the late 90s for this very purpose. The very pop acts that the other poster listed are known to use autotuners. Instead of finding good singers, all the recording industry has to do is find pretty people who can sing passably well enough to work with the autotuner. It's essentially the final nail in the coffin of actual talent in pop acts.
This "levels the playing field" in an industry supposedly based on bringing the best of the best to the national stage. Standards in the recording industry have been slipping for years. One reason for this is that truly talented and popular acts are hard to keep control of contractually. They have enough creativity and talent to jump ship to other labels or create their own labels and survive for years. This is pretty much the opposite of what the recording industry wants. This technology will allow them to take more talentless nobodies and propel them to the national stage with the implicit understanding that without the company that sponsored them, they are nothing. More talented yet more difficult to control musicians can be left more and more to the wayside. In essence, it allows a talent-based industry to get away with selling products without true talent, thus cutting long-term expenses for them.
This technology's a gift from the heavens in karaoke bars, but it'll be just another step in purging all vitality and talent from popular music.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A concert where the artist sounds great, or a concert where the artist sounds terrible? If I pay $50 per seat, I'd like to hear something I'll enjoy, whether it is slightly modified or not. Bad music isn't fun.
I wouldn't pay $50 dollars to see an artist who needs a crutch of this magnitude.
An artist who misses a note or two isn't going to sound terrible. Experienced live performers will just keep belting it out rather than tripping over it for several bars. If you expect a Live performance to sound just like the CD you bought then why bother going? You have the CD.
If the artist is so off key that they need this device then you paid $50 dollars too much to see a no-talent hack.
well, a lot of people have been saying this, and I chose to respond to yours.
The Grateful Dead are a perfect example of why it doesn't matter one single bit if someone is a) out of tune b) forgets the words c) starts humming hoping the rest of the band picks up for it, etc.
Donna sang like crap (miked wrong, horrible singer, tone deaf, whatever) yet she brought a different dimension to the group.
Jerry would FREQUENTLY forget words and just trail off into no where during songs he had sung 100s of times.
Bobby (even now, Joliet, IL even) can't remember ALL the words to ALL their songs. Hell, the newer members of the band probably know the songs better than Jerry or Bobby ever did.
They were/are a successful band because they PERFOM for REAL.
They don't perform just for the money. They don't get dressed up like belly dancers, and they don't have plastic surgery.
They do it for the fans and for the music. Who the fuck cares if the songs are slightly out of tune (do you think that everyone in the crowd singing along is in tune? I know I'm not).
Enjoy the bands that perform live, write their own music, and do it for the fans.
Fuck the cookie cutter musicians that are extorting money from their naive teenage fans.
There's two ways to view things like this. Either as a tool to enhance something (if you can't sing, for example), which is the intended use... Or to be used as an instrument in its own right.
The latter gets my vote a lot more. Before you get upset and hope it never takes off, just think: Mellotrons haven't replaced orchestras, drum machines haven't replaced drummers, and samplers haven't replaced every other instrument in the history of time. They all sound good in their own right, not as clones of other things.
At least with talented singers, you are probably not going to notice any vocal strain due to extended periods of singing, unless you are a professional vocal coach.
In the same way that athletes train and stay in shape, so do musicians train their vocal chords. In each case, it helps them be able to not get tired.
This is why you will see a few days break more often than not during concert tours. (Well, that and the time it takes to travel.)
Also, most musicians know what their livlihood is, and will not risk damaging their voice. As such, if you are in risk of a worse concert experience, the artist is in risk of a worse voice. Most artists have the sense to simply cancel shows, and you will get refunded, or tickets to a resheduled date.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Since then, the line between musicianship and show business grew a little clearer through the use of recording and visual technology, enabling both poor performers/good singers and poor singers/good performers to have their 15 minutes of fame. We ended up seeing a lot of people noting the differences between live performances and studio albums, often opting to not see their favorite acts live because their performances were mediocre.
Perhaps we experience some conflict over the difference between live performance and studio recording because we expect imperfections in live shows but want flawless recordings. Maybe we don't want "perfect" (sometimes read: inorganic) sounding music in such a spontaneous atmosphere but still want the show to sound like the studio record. The line between musicianship and show business is certainly blurring again, but is it cheating if our expectations have gotten too high?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
PITCH CORRECTION IS MY PET PEEVE ABOUT TODAY'S MUSIC!!!!!
...the newer punk bands, such as Sum 41 and Good Charlottes, would sound awful if they weren't corrected with an autotuner.
(Yes, I was shouting, that's how peeved it makes me.)
I've been telling my friends this for years. I can barely listen to any new artists because they sound so FAKE.
> Mr. Barry said he relies on the autotuner when
> a musician's performance is nearly flawless
> except for that one flat note "that's going
> to drive everyone crazy" or when there are
> time constraints.
That's pretty much my point of view. This should only be necessary about 1% of the time.
>
So, sign bands that can SING AND PLAY instead of pretty boys (and girls) who will look good on posters, t-shirts, and lunchboxes!
AAAARGH!!!
(Me: singer/guitarist)
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
The talent portion and 'soul' behind the music is gone...that's what I think is killing music today. I'd much rather in the day, seen the Stones get up and play...they sounded hardly like their albums, but, when on stage..you could 'feel' the energy...Keith and Mick Taylor/Ronnie Wood crunching out chords..Jagger jumping all around...they made an audience part of the experience. I'd rather see Jimmy Page of Zeppelin get up and try to blister out a million notes per/sec on the guitar...hell, he flubbed tons of them...but, there was soul and feeling behind the music. Who cared if Robt's voice broke on occasion...the whole live show was an experience...
Unfortunately....groups today..in many cases don't have that feeling to their music. The pre-fabbed groups don't pay their dues in bars...concert after concert grinding it out and perfecting into show bands as did the bands of old.
I miss the days where the albums were just something to get you excited to go SEE the group in person...'cause they had showmanship and would play the songs as they felt it that night. You didn't expect it to be 'just like the record'...in fact, I was disappointed if there wasn't some improv. in each song. Dancing and choreography isn't bad, but, should take 2nd place to the performance.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?"
Is a Moog Synthesizer fake? (I remebmer people griping aobut it, back when it was new.) Are electric guitars fake? How about elecric guitars plus the plethora of modification devices (wah-wah, fuzz box {originally emulating a blown speaker cone}, maybe a dozen others). Should we just abandon rock/punk/metal/etc. music as "fake" and go back to acoustic guitars? (Like the folkies that booed Dylan when he came out for one set with an electric guitar.) And take the seeds out of Sitars while we're at it?
And let's dump the voice modification technology that's been around since before electrical recording - like the little megaphone to give that narrow-band sound to a voice that's been used since at least the '20s for starters. (Think the lead singer on _Winchester Cathedral_) Take that "voice box" hose out of Peter Frampton's throat on _Do You Feel Like We Do?_ What a cheat!
Let's take the mutes out of trumpets, and the fists out of french horns. Jaw harps and kazoos can go on the trash heap.
Dump bagpipes, oboes, clarinets, saxaphones, and the rest of the reed instruments. (Reeds are just fake vocal cords.) Take the valves from trumpets and the slides from trombones. Heck - dump the horns entirely: A mouthpiece to modify your lip buzz to replace your vocal cords and a brass resonator to replace your vocal tract? Totally fake!
Trash those drums, too. If you can't make the sound you want by clapping, stomping, or using your vocal tract it's obviously fake.
Harpsicords have to go - they're "fixing" the striking force. Pianos: Take off the pedals. Take away the resonator. Heck, take away the keyboard and hammer (darned mnemonics anyhow). Stick to a harp.
Take those frets off the guitar - they're a cheat! If you can't finger-tune it like a bass or a violin you don't deserve to perform!
Wait a minute: Strings? Tuned for you? Dump it!
If you don't want "fake", stick to acapella. And try to compete with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, The Nylons, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
= = = = =
Pop music is about making sounds that please their audience - using as much, or as little, tech as the artist choses to use and the audience choses to accept.
= = = = =
And the tech isn't just a cleanup. Watch it make possible more interesting sounds.
Which has already been done. (Example: the chorus of Cher's _Do you Believe in Life after Love?_, where just such a pitch altering device is used to form note-shifts faster than a human vocal tract can, creating a hint of human/machine convergence and a subtle reference to immortality-by-uploading, reenforcing the message about post-romance depression and overcoming it - in addition to sounding neat.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Amen. Live shows are all about spontaneity and feedback. I've seen old bands put such new spins on their material that I didn't recognize what they were playing until a minute or two into the song; the sense of familiarity mixed with novelty is exhilirating. I've seen plenty of botched chords and lyrics, and as you say, it's all about the artist's reactions, how they recover.
At the last Yes concert I attended, Jon tripped over a cable while backing up to give Steve room for a solo, and fell flat on his back. You could hear the crowd gasp. He bounced right back to his feet, and was fine by the time the next vocals came around. When the song was done, he grinned and said "All I could think was 'thank god I'm among friends'". You'll never get that kind of immediacy and connection listening to a CD, or watching a meticulously hyper-engineered 'concert'.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
>Most singers have imperfect pitch. I'd go so far as to say *every* singer does.
You mean most *people*. Good singers have perfect pitch. Its how *they* get to be rich, and *you* need pitch correction.
>Your brain corrects pitch generally to a Pythagorean scale (perfect intervals at fifths and octaves, with the third exactly one-half way between the fundamental and fifth).
Crap. My brain was not built by pythagorus. It can, however, recognise harmonious frequencies with astonishing accuracy. It does not correct pitch.
>If you listen to an accappella choir, they will nearly always gravitate toward this scale.
OMG!
>The unfortunate side effect of a Pythagorean scale is that if the tune changes to another key, it sounds simply awful.
Are you nuts? Since when does a key change sound awful? Perhaps if you change to a key that is not 'right' for the piece. Or perhaps if not everyone does it at the same time. Key is a basis in a scale, pitch is frequency. Singing out of tune has nothing to do with pythagorus.
>Choirs can get away with this because they adjust their tuning on-the-fly to still sound good with one another when doing key changes.
They don't adjust their tuning. They all change key at the same time.
>Pianos, guitars, and many other instruments have a great deal of trouble with this.
What? Changing key? No. Changing pitch on-the-fly? Why would you want to - to sound crap? Changing scale, yes.
>...piano requires a skilled tuner at least 10 minutes or so to adjust.
You cannot change a piano to another scale, and have its keyboard make sense. And I defy anyone to retune a piano to another scale in 10 minutes. It takes longer than that to tune a piano at the best of times (except minor adjustments).
>Thus most people are accustomed to hearing something as "in-tune" only when it is performed to an even-tempered scale.
This is a cultural thing. Most people in a culture that does not use 'our' scale, would think theirs is very much in tune.
>This fights the vocalists natural ability to judge tune based on harmonic interaction with the rest of the song.
This is your arse talking.
>As a recording artist, I make regular use of pitch correction. You'll find that virtually every major artist commercial artist does, as well.
If you are recording yourself and make regular use of pitch correction, you might want to think about not giving up your day job. If you are recording someone else, I hope they are paying you lots. Every major commercial artist? - I don't think so. Maybe all the boppy mass produced rubbish - but not (c)RAP 'artists', we all know they can't sing anyway.
>The "effect" you refer to is often called the "Cher Effect" from the song, "Life After Love"...
It is not and has never been called the Cher Effect. Its called over compression. Yes it has been pitch corrected, but vocoders have been doing this for years.
>Most uses are quite subtle, and are most often used to smooth out the rough edges in a once-in-a-lifetime recording.
Obviously not so subtle if you only make one recording in a lifetime, eh.
>Anyway, get used to pitch correction. It's been in common use for over fifteen years on commercial recordings, but only recently has the technology become cheap enough that it's accessible to live performance and lower-end home recording artists. It's no more "BS" than a motion picture studio rigging cameras up for "bullet time", trapeze artists using a net, or stuntmen playing body doubles for stars in a motion picture. It's the ultimate quality of the performance that matters, and whatever you can do to bring the quality up a notch is probably a good thing.
I will never get used to pitch correction. The fact that the technology has become cheap is a bad thing. It means a whole load of no talent gits spew out their collective self-indulgent crap and think tha