Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?
An anonymous reader writes: The music industry has gone through dramatic changes over the past thirty years. Virtually everything is different except the structure of the songs we listen to. Distribution methods have long influenced songwriting habits, from records to CDs to radio airplay. So will streaming services, through their business models, incentivize a change to song form itself? Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios, and the shift to digital is providing them with ever more data about what people like to listen to. And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created, from auto-tune and electronic beats to the massive amount of processing that goes into getting the exact sound a studio wants.
No. No it won't.
That's more a result of auto-tune and the loudness war. Actually this whole thing started in the late 80s, with 1990 being about the tipping point.
Before 1990 people tended to write lyrics and then set them to music. The music was built around what the vocalist could sing, because clearly the lead can only make one sound at a time and has to breathe from time to time. Then sampling became popular and people started to sample and layer up vocals, stitching them together in a way that no vocalist could repeat in real life, and applying effects to them.
People who sing will be familiar with this, especially if they do a lot of covers of popular songs (e.g. karaoke). A lot of post 1990 stuff is very hard to do live, if not impossible.
Later we got auto-tune. That lets people do ridiculous things with their voices, because they can hit notes effortlessly and it becomes more like playing an instrument than actually singing. Add the loudness war in and you get lots of distortion and ringing added into the vocal mix. Real time effects are standard too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I wouldn't say technology has made music un-singable. Yeah, there are some tracks out there with vocals layered using a sampler. But you've had layered vocals since the dawn of time in the form of duets and harmony singing in larger groups. Effects like chorus and reverb can be pretty much ignored when singing - lots of them are just used to replicate the sound of a particular physical environment. Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung. Complaining that you can't make the sound coming out of your mouth sound identical to what you hear on a record is a bit of a ridiculous comparison... it's a bit like saying you can't sing Yesterday unless your voicebox is an exact 1:1 mold of Paul McCartney's.