Good question, and one I’m invested in as a writer. Here’s an article I found about an AI that uses others’ digital art to create AI comic book art. What interested me are the wide variety of responses from human artists.
So they use one particular technology in their performances. They also use recording technology, so people who aren’t physically present can hear their music. And even for live performances, they use audio amplification technology, so that more people can hear them live. And neither of those is a completely passive technology: At every concert, there’s a guy at a soundboard making sure to adjust the gain on every microphone, to make the best mix of sounds possible, and I’m sure they make sure to get the best audio tech they can. And this specific group might not use instruments, like guitars and keyboards and drums, but most do, and those are a technological cheat, too.
Plus, autotune is available to everyone. You could get autotune yourself, and record tracks with it. Even with it, could you produce anything near as good as Pentatonix does? Clearly, there’s still considerable skill and talent there.
This is a question I’ve seen come up often, and frankly it’s something I just don’t care at all about. All I care is whether the song sounds good or not. The technology used, or not used, to make it does not interest me in the slightest.
One of my students wants to be a manga artist and recently discovered how good these apps are getting. She’s discouraged because it looks like it will much harder to become a professional artist.
The fact that, on your own, you had no idea the music was tech aided until you were told shows that the end product is just as good in every respect. When it is all said and done, it is the end product that matters.
The title of this thread is “Technology vs Raw Talent”. But a performance of a professional singer is not an example of raw talent. It is raw talent, plus years of studying music theory, plus years of conditioning their lips and throats, plus years of training their ears and vocal cords, plus years of rehearsals.
Sometimes I want to hear an acoustic guitar, with catgut strings, played by a folkie in a coffeehouse.
Sometimes I want to hear an electric guitar, with steel strings, pickups, amplifiers, and a wah-wah pedal, played by a metal-head in a stadium.
Good point. The use of ‘raw’ in the title is inconsistent with what I’m trying to get at.
You will not be surprised to learn that the “10,000 Hour Rule” has been debunked many, many times.
Ah, but has it been debunked 10,000 times?
That only works if everyone who debunks it spends at least an hour doing so…
I think it matters how you get there, too. There’s art in creating art. I appreciate hand-made goods in many contexts.
I think autotuning voices that are almost perfect is like using a Dremel rather than sandpaper to smooth off that little bit over there. It doesn’t offend my sensibilities. But i can see how it would bother someone else.
We already saw that without autotune IMO. Popular music isn’t necessarily about technical excellence, it’s as much about attitude, look, message and style as about the actual music itself. I mean, people liked Queen as much because of the band’s songwriting ability and Freddie Mercury’s general stage/show persona as they did for his and the rest of the band’s musical prowess. Lots of other bands are competent, but not necessarily where they are because of their musical abilities, and lots of extraordinarly competent musicians and vocalists are languishing in obscurity or near-obscurity because they’re boring, or just unlucky.
I feel like steroids though, are something different. They don’t add skill or refine skill, they just make it a lot easier to recover, and in the case of muscle-building, let people go beyond where their body would normally do so.
To use a car racing metaphor, autotune is like some sort of driver-assistance technology that would help them keep their lane or shift at just the right point for maximum power, regardless of how sloppy they are with the clutch pedal or steering wheel. Steroids are more like some kind of additive in the gas that just gives it more power.
Maybe some mod can change ‘raw’ in the title to ‘innate’?
Done.
I know it’s a little off topic, but i totally agree with this. In effect, Cher was given access to a new musical instrument, and was playing around to see what she could do with it. That’s what artists do, and i think the result was deservedly a huge success.
I like hand made wooden objects, but i also own some 3d printed “wood”, and it’s a great substance with lots of valuable properties and i hope it gets explored and used to great effect.
Not surprising. And there are some who say that excessive practice can actually work against you.
On the other end of the spectrum are artists who claim to never practice, yet they’re considered great. One that comes to mind is Johnny Ramone.
And that Tom Waits fellow. He could really stand to take a vocal lesson or two to refine his voice. And maybe some piano lessons too. 
FWIW, perfect/absolute pitch isn’t that big a deal. It’s kind of overhyped in popular culture and doesn’t imply skill or even musical talent. A middling singer with perfect pitch is going sound just like a middling singer without it.
Yeah, for the most part, that is my take on it. Autotune is a tool, and even when it’s used to simply correct someone’s pitch and not as an obvious effect, it’s really just a shortcut around editing the best takes together when used that way. Now, some people might be more forgiving of someone who edited together the best takes, since that takes some skill and is time consuming. I don’t really see that much difference, myself.
It’s been mentioned before, but I’ll re-iterate it: Every recording you hear is somewhat a fiction. Even in the days of recording with a single microphone straight to disc, they’d record several takes and keep the best one. If nothing else, the response of the microphone will make them sound different than they did in the room.
And well, those tools let you do things that humans actually cannot do. There’s about an instant of actual noises that come from an acoustic instrument in this track (a human voice). Everything else is synthesized, and the drum part is pretty much impossible for a human.
(caution: lots of very rapidly flashing images)
Yes, you have, almost 100% certainly. As many others have stated, Autotune (or one of its many, many siblings) used with caution by a professional is imperceptible. It’s not a matter of „switching it on“ and it’ll do its thing, there’s a lot of fine-tuning (heh) involved, sometimes for every individual note. I’ve edited many vocal tracks myself, using Melodyne, and it is just one tool of many used to get the best performance. If someone without talent were to just switch on Autotune, the result would sound a lot like „Believe“. Also, you can’t Autotune emotion and vocal expression. Nobody in the world is going to make Bob Dylan (or any other technically unproficient singer) sound like Freddy Mercury.
Perfect pitch is not the same thing as „pitch perfect“. The latter means being able to play/sing perfectly in tune, whereas the former means being able to identify any pitch you hear. That’s not the same as being able to sing it exactly, especially together in an ensemble with other singers.