The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune 437
theodp writes "For a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound better than great — they're note- and pitch-perfect. It's all thanks to Auto-Tune, the brainchild of Andy Hildebrand, who realized that the wonders of autocorrelation — which he once used to map drilling sites for the oil industry — could also be used to bestow perfect pitch upon the Britney Spears of the world. While Auto-Tune was intended to be used unnoticed, musicians are growing fond of adjusting the program's retune speed to eliminate the natural transition between notes, which yield jumpy and automated-sounding vocals. 'I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,' says Hildebrand."
As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.
Re:Real Time? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The sting in the tail (Score:2, Informative)
Auto-Tune does real-time processing.
AudioSlave (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Real Time? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:25 or 50 years? (Score:1, Informative)
No there wasn't. It was pretending to be the singer that did that. Lip synching to your own music has been around since Dick Clark was a teenager.
Re:Real-time Auto-Tune (Score:5, Informative)
That performance would have undoubtedly been better without auto-tune.
Re:Authenticity (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure if most people really cared whether they did or didn't. All I know is I like most of their stuff that I've heard so far
Re:Inauthentic? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I'd rather Dr. Dre, Eminem and Jay-Z have guns than Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I've read what they wrote and I've read what others have written about their lives, any man giving those people automatic weapons should be sent to jail for a long time.
Is this some kind of zombie joke? Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg have all been dead for a long time now.
Re:Overused & Abused (Score:1, Informative)
For those who don't know the effect, a striking example you will already know is "Life after love" by Cher.
The rise and fall of effects, their popularity and influence on all styles of music is written through all of music history. The cycle of use, overuse, subversion, genrification and counter-movement is plain to anyone who studies music technology. For example, the appearance of a "flanger" effect in the 1960's influenced guitar music enormously. First it was used on a few seminal records. Then everyone wanted that sound. Eventually it came to symbolise an entire genre of "60's hippy druggy music". Now it is a cliche that can be applied to any guitar sound when you want to suggest "far out man!". This is not the first vocal effect to become popular and follow the cycle. The vocoder did the rounds in the 70's and early 80's. Sometimes a technique is subverted mid-stream, Such as the TB303 sound which spawned the entire genre of acid house when it was used in an unintended fashion.
However, whoever discovered digital distortion by clipping probably thought no one in their right mind would want to use that ... and they have been for the most part correct.
Not quite. If you are familiar with the branches of the lo-fi movement called "glitch" or "grime techno" you will hear that hard digital clipping plays s big part.
I'm going to make a prediction that this is going to turn out to be a lot like synth drums in the 80s.
I Think you are correct, this corresponds to phases one and two of the cycle.
Synth drums are still used today but tastefully and when needed and--most importantly--in moderation.
No. It is a fine and hard to predict balance, whether an effect is strong enough generally to become an established technique or become a cliche. A technique must have broad parametric use. I strongly think Autotune effects will become a cliche and typify "early noughties cheese pop music".
But these albums where every song has this applied to it are probably going to look like we resurrected & worshipped Max Headroom to future generations.
Indeed. N-n-n-Nineteen. Paul Hardcastle (for those who know him) instantly, and maybe unwittingly, joined the ranks of the novelty record gods.
One more important thing: you don't know who is doing this. Is it Britney Spears? Does she really have control over her music?
Fair question, to which you know the answer. No. The producers decide this. They beat the drum as far as artistic technique goes. They tell her it's cool and she does what she is told.
Are the fans actually demanding it?
This is rhetorical in the music business. The "fans", insomuch as they exist, buy what is given to them. People within that purchasing age group don't make artistic choices about what is on offer.
If this package is only $600 then why don't we see more bands (even independent) using this stuff? That's within any studio's price range.
Because it's essentially a shit effect, and most bands have the artistic integrity not to jump on such a cheap waggon.
I'm going to guess that it's safer for the corporate guys who run Spears & Co to bet on a machine to make perfect pitch.
Well, there's obviously serious artists, say Norah Jones or Annie Lennox, signed to similar labels, but they don't get packaged by such cheap production values. It's all about the market and target audience, there is only a "safer" within those parameters.
Kudos to Hildebrand for making such a large jump between two completely different fields for the same technology. That stuff is getting more and more rare these days.
To be fair the method has been around since the 70's in a non digital form. Obviously autocorrelation has this great application to pitch correction in the digital domain, but the concept has been done with phase locked loops and tape speed correction for a long time. Just in the early days it was something only a few
Re:Real-time Auto-Tune (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, there is real time autotune, look at boxes made by http://www.antarestech.com/ andtares and TC-Helicon http://www.tc-helicon.com/VoicePro.asp
Re:Real-time Auto-Tune (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Authentic is the wrong word (Score:1, Informative)
Another article about this story:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/06/09/080609crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=all
Re:Authenticity (Score:4, Informative)
The disclaimer on their early albums wasn't because they felt synths to be artificial or 'unmusical' or even 'cheating'. As you rightly point out - they used synths a lot in the '80s.
It was because they, together with their producer Roy Thomas Baker, created a wall of sound using ONLY guitars and vocals as the source. They wanted people to know that these eerily perfect sounds weren't coming out of a vocoder or synthesizer - that they hadn't taken any shortcuts.
This is the oldest hat in the book! (Score:3, Informative)
Vocoders have been developed since 1936.
The problems always were the number of channels/bands. The more, the better it sounds. But only with computers, you can simulate many of them, without it resulting a huge machine.
As an example, a typical vocoder that I used for fun effects (because nobody says than any of the two inputs has to be voice, or even an instrument), had 8 bands.
Modern software, like the one from "Native Instruments" has 1024 bands, and I bet they went up since I last looked, nearly two years ago.
And that's all. It's just that since it was the style at that time to add noticeable vocoder effects on purpose, and that nowadays you can have them very powerful and very cheap, that everybody knows how to use them. So if you're a big music producer of a crook (which is the same thing) why not make more cash, by not letting you stop by the little annoyance of a totally crappy singer, when she has big tits.
Re:Old technology (Score:1, Informative)
Autocorrelation has been used for pitch detection since the 1970's. The basic algorithm in AutoTune uses autocorrelation for pitch detection, and applies Keith Lent's formant preserving pitch shifting, which was from a 1990 Computer Music Journal article. The pitch shifting method was also independently established (and called PSOLA) in some French journals in the late 1980's.
Hildebrand didn't invent any of the above concepts, but he did a great job turning them into a usable product.
Re:Authentic is the wrong word (Score:4, Informative)
There was a very exciting interview on CBC Radio [cbc.ca] last year about various artists who do or don't use pitch control software and why they do or don't.
The expert being interviewed pointed out that of all the singers analyzed, Bob Dylan has nearly perfect pitch. You may not like the tone of his voice, but his pitch is spot-on.
Re:The sting in the tail (Score:4, Informative)
>One day I'd like to see a collection of music charts sorted by author rather than by performer and see if there are any interesting patterns...
You'd see Linda Perry [wikipedia.org] all over the place, for one thing.
Re:Authentic is the wrong word (Score:3, Informative)
Drummers have been using triggered drums since the mid-80s. Neil Pert, famously, used them to avoid the difficulty of keeping drums in tune between recording sessions. For live play it is even more useful, especially for outdoor venues.
For rock musicians, the trick is that the triggered drums feed into a synthesizer that uses recordings of "perfect" drum hits. To use the same example, Neil Pert spent hours getting just the right sound from each drum. Then he triggered his drum set, with the triggers actuating those "perfect" drum recordings.
Personally, I don't see what's the matter with this. You could get the same effect by just spending a lot of extra time tuning drums. Other musicians use it to get effects you couldn't otherwise get from regular drums.
However, this is different from auto-tune, where singers sound more talented than they really are. In the case of triggered drums, drummers just sound like better drum tuners than they really are.
Re:Authentic is the wrong word (Score:1, Informative)