For kicks I was reading wiki about Auto-tune. It does two main things (that I can tell) in mainstream music. 1)It corrects a singers voice so even if they are off pitch, they sound perfectly in tune and 2)It makes that weird vocal sound that was made popular by Cher in the song Believe (and many others since her).
Anyways, the wiki article mentions that it was invented by Exxon (yup, the oil people) for interpreting seismic data, but they soon realized it could be used to detect and modify pitch.
Kinda neat.
Maybe time to flog Symphony of Science again.
But the suggested videos on the side where related to “Auto-Tune” so that was neat.
Yep, I saw a TV special on it a while back and they interviewed the guy who invented it. Cool story.
The two best uses of it in my opinion:
This
And this, Turtle Fence!
Auto-tune may have been invented by some guy working for Exxon, but the idea has been around for a long time. Kansas (the rock group, not the state) used to use something similar to clean up their vocals and get everything on pitch, and that was way back in the 70s (I’m sure that was some old analog system using something like phase locked loops, not the digital method that Auto-tune uses). Kansas got a lot of flack for it at the time too because people said they were faking or cheating in their recordings.
I was initially shocked at this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0F4iXEzOqY
until I listened to it and found it very moving.
I am a big fan of thisone.
Anyone think Carl Sagan sounds like Kermit in these?
Wow. I don’t mean to threadshit, but these are all really horrible to me.