Inspired by this thread.
On the rare occasion I listen to the radio, I’ll often hear a song that is in a different key from that which I am used to hearing from a variety of other sources. Usually it will be higher pitched. I can guess that a slightly different tape speed may have been responsible in olden times, but aren’t songs played today in the form of .WAV files?
Why exactly is this?
I had a friend who worked at a radio station. They have a device that increases the speed of the music just slightly.
Why? It allows the station to squeeze the music down and open up more commercial time. Mo’ money, mo’ money!
Most people don’t notice it.
drat beaten to the punch… yes they speed the music up. Is a pet peeve of mine actually. I despise sped up music.
I’ve noticed that even on a single album or CD there will be slight variations in pitch–not just that the different songs are in different keys, which is to be expected, but that the whole scale will be slightly off. I attribute this to the master tape having been run slightly slower or faster on one song relative to another.
When I was learning guitar I used to play along to the Doors’ debut album. I’d tune my guitar to the first song, Break On Through, which is in the key of E. But when I got to Light My Fire, which is in A, I couldn’t play to it without adjusting the tuning. This wasn’t because the guitar had gone out of tune, it was because if I tried playing along in A, it was too sharp. If I tried playing in A-flat, it was too flat.
So sometimes the songs were just produced that way, and it’s not something being done at the radio station.
Re radio stations speeding up the music, why does that necessarily change the pitch? I have a MP3-playing program that can play tracks at any speed without altering the pitch. It came free with my soundcard, I imagine WinAmp et al can do it too with the appropriate plug-in.
I am not 100% sure about now, but big radio stations all used CARTs in the past for almost everything besides live audio. A CART is basically an 8-track tape with one track on it. The pitch shift is caused by speeding up the tape, I guess.
I know that they are supposed to be using CD’s, but they aren’t using them on a daily basis. They use the CD to make the CART, then nobody plays the wrong song, since there is usually only one song per CART.
(My way of verifying that CARTs are still common: KZPS has been using the same cart for Led Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker/Living Loving Maid song two-play for years. When you hear Heartbreaker, you are gonna hear LLM next. I have the timing of them down, and can hit the first note of LLM on time, every time. The pause between them has not varied for years.)
[HIJACK]
MarmaMusic* has a program that analyzes a song and attempts to figure out what chords are being played. On top of that, it analyzes the pitch that song is in. While doing some transcription work, I’ve found songs where A does not equal 440 on the CD. It’s moved around from 429 to 452 and more. [/BYEJACK]
*This website has been unavailable for a couple days… 
Programs that can do this are pretty common, but it produces artifacts in the music. This is because in order to speed up a piece of music without altering its pitch, you can’t just play it faster; you need to slice it up into tiny chunks and then actually skip a fraction of the chunks when you’re playing back the song. This is hardly noticeable to most people most of the time, but if you know what to listen for, it’s a definite degradation in the quality. It’s especially obvious as a “beat” on notes that are held for a long time.
True, but would the artefacts be noticeable in an FM or AM broadcast?
Timing artifacts would be noticable to perceptive listeners even if the tonal quaity over the air was poor.
It depends on how well it’s done. Technologically, it’s possible to do it well enough that you wouldn’t notice over the radio, but I’ve never seen a program that could do it without it being noticeable to me on at least some pieces of music. My ears aren’t that good, so I’d guess that any artifact that is obvious enough to annoy me is also going to be audible over the radio.
But radio stations already do horrible things to the fidelity of the source signal, and nobody cares, or not enough people care. They compress the dynamic range so that the music sounds louder, because, apparently, louder stations sound better at first listen. If they can get away with that, I suspect they can get away with subtle things like the “artefacts” discussed here.
I won’t hijack this thread by discussing how much KZPS has gone to shit since Clear Channel (aka, The Debil!) slurped them up, but it has.
That being said, I don’t think many large, modern radio stations use CARTs any longer. It’s all on disk, most likely in a compressed format, just waiting for some producer or board-op to queue up the songs.
I was going to link to the website of one of the manufacturers of such an “audio delivery system”, Enco, but everytime I went to the site, it crashed my browser. Google at your own risk. In Dallas, the home of the lamented KZPS, I KNOW The Ticket (1310 AM) uses an Enco machine. They mention it on the air sometimes.
Turek:
Ok, I accept that they are probably using a digital machine nowadays. My only experience at a radio station was at KNON (community radio), and they were lucky to have CD players. I agree, KZPS is drek, just about every commercial station in this town is. I still miss KZEW <sigh>.
You’re probably right. I just meant to throw in one factor in why speeding the music up digitally isn’t necessarily better.
I have heard that some bands don’t use A 440 to tune so that it catches the listener’s ear and stands out some. So they might use A 442 or 441 ect.
Another chance to show off my encyclopedic knowledge of obsolete technology.
Way back in the pre digital days of radio, we simply recorded a song to tape, then sped up the tape. Our music folks calculated you could speed up most songs by about 3% before they started to sound “chipmunky.”
The goal was not to squeeze in more commercials (we did that by whacking out entire verses and instrumental bridges) but to make our music sound peppier and brighter. Since that would make our radio station sound peppier and brighter, our competitors would therefore sound dull and flat.
I’m less familiar with the digital world, but I believe it is possible to change the pitch somewhat without noticably affecting the beat or timing of the music.
The only way anyone would notice is if they have perfect pitch, and that is very rare. Most people can detect changes in pitch but not absolute pitch.
A lot of bands aren’t in tune simply because they don’t bother. They just tune their instruments to each other. If all you have is a guitar and a bass, then it really doesn’t matter.
Also, sometimes they will intentionally speed up and slow down songs just because it does make the sound different.
As was already said, its not always the radio station’s fault.
Speeding up tapes is also common in television stations.
IIRC, occasionally on classical LPs, they’d speed up a performance slightly to fit it on one side.