Yes but autotune is a style choice for artists. It's a not something every musician uses. It hasn't taken over music, and it's not like anyone can become a musician because autotune exists.
Disclaimer: I'm not a music producer, and my ear isn't that great, but I did write software for one of the major pitch-correction vendors for many years, and I think I have a better-than-average ear for it after listening to it for many years.
Pitch correction is something which is used on many, many professionally-produced tracks, and often without the knowledge or consent of the performers. Whether you can hear it or not is a stylistic choice (provided adequate skill from the production team: see [1]). But just because the pitch correction isn't in your face, T-Pain- or Cher-style, doesn't mean it isn't there. The software is better than that, and in the right hands, it just makes people sound more skilled than they are, and you can't hear it.
Producers generally are pretty quiet about where they use it to mask blemishes in the performance, probably because they don't want to embarrass anyone. But the producers we sold to would certainly say how much they used it, without naming artists or tracks.
I was involved in the recording and production for a top 40 producer, and can confirm that there was autotune on every single vocal track that left the studio.
Here are a few that I was in the room when the artist was recording, and can confirm pitch correction:
The first one has that metallic sound that is a dead give away. First falsetto is quieter than the second one, and you can really hear as he increases the loudness of his voice, the metallic kicks in https://youtu.be/450p7goxZqg?t=1m27s
Second one has a "Cher moment" almost straight away, just after "wandering the desert a thousand days" the following "mmmm" has a glissando between two notes where we clearly hear the hard edge on what I assume is an auto tune lookahead. I don't actually know how they work, I just assume there's a lookahead for the next note approximation which makes glissandos sound funny. https://youtu.be/M8uPvX2te0I?t=31s
The last one I can't really fault for too much autotune, more a lack of it. The bridge is especially intense https://youtu.be/E0oyglKjbFQ?t=1m51s
Say the singer loses the pitch slightly for half a second on a held note. If that fluctuation is corrected, what auditory information could be left for you to detect the modification?
I believe I hear pitch correction when it's obviously used, and it's a lot. Pretty much most of the "top forty" pop pablum from the last 20 years. I believe there is pitch correction that I don't spot: the "dark matter" of pitch correction that is done less cheesily.
The worst of it sounds almost like packet loss concealment in a G.722 voice stream: the sustained part of a vocal note basically sounding synthesized.
>Yes but autotune is a style choice for artists. It's a not something every musician uses. It hasn't taken over music, and it's not like anyone can become a musician because autotune exists.
You'd be surprised on both fronts :-)
On the first because autotune is prevalent regardless of genre and style choices (even in rock, country, etc). It's just the Cher/T-pain effect that has been toned done, but autotune is very much in use in the industry for vocal correction.
On the second, because almost any crap singer pop idol with nice looks can pretend to be in tune and pass out bearable results because of autotune.
We disagree on that, and that's OK. To me there is something special about a live performance. Even more so when it's challenging for the performer. When a signer demonstrates range, or a musician displays technical excellence or provides emotional depth through expression it adds a LOT in my opinion. Knowing this is all faked in recorded music takes something away from it.
Ditto for photography. To take an image and retouch it, or to artificially saturate colors can make a great picture. But with a raw photo it's even more interesting to think that scene actually existed and someone captured it for us to look at.
In either case, I can enjoy the work but will only be impressed if I know that it's authentic. This is more true than ever today.
But then again, where do you draw this line for what is authentic and isn't?
In music are you allowed to use amplifiers and speakers? They can add a lot of color and distortion. How about reverb? Rooms that aren't there. EQ to remove unwanted frequencies? Synthesizers? Digital effects? At what point is it not authentic anymore?
Same for photography. Are you allowed to touch the aperture? ISO? Shutter speed? Flash? Digital camera? At what point is it not authentic?
The thing is, the subject of a photo, the scene and its subjects, are usually not the artists. The photographer is the artist. Photography is processing from the get-go: how the film or CCD responds to light and so on. The grain from low-light on sensitive film can be part of the art and so on.
If you mess with the colors of a scene, you're not taking away artistic control from that scene.
You also don't put limitations on the post processing art; you're not doing it to fool anyone.
There is post processing in music that is obvious art in an analogous way, like taking sampled sounds and re-mixing them to create new stuff. There are effects that are obviously effects. I'm not going to scoff at a great studio reverb, or some echo applied to a vocal or whatever. Nobody is saying that this was recorded in some fjord in Sweden with real echo bouncing off a distant ice wall; there is no lie.
In that case, we are just transferring artistic control from one human into another. In the past recording audio had fairly little artistic control and the subjects of the recording most of the control. Now with better audio manipulation software the person doing the recording has artistic tools at their disposal. They are the 'photographers' of the scene, while the singer is the subject.
That's right, and the subject might as well be a dog, or any other audio signal source, just like anything that reflects light can be a suitable one for the photographer's creative process. Cute puppies; water lilies; sunsets ...
The thing is, I somehow don't hear the studio's creative input either when I hear the latest auto-tuned Fido or Bowser. They're just applying some automatic something that's supposed to make the dog sound like a more able dog.
This is like when people just batch apply the same color enhancement and sharpening of their Florida vacation pictures. I've seen one instance, I've seen them all.
This is where auto-tune actually can fall. Singing is not exactly all about hitting the "in equal temperament tune" note all the time.
Take the fantastic singer with great technical skill. Most pitch correction algorithms, as far as I know, are strictly based on equal temperament / 12TET. Fantastic singers are capable of hitting the right harmonics, some of which are not 12TET. Fantastic singers slide into notes, they use vibrato, they add "blue notes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_note). If you over-apply pitch correction, in other words, you could easily make a fantastic singer sound worse.
Let's also take the singer who is technically a bit pitch deficient, but has "character" that makes up for it. You don't want to make this type of singer too in-tune, either. Too much tuning might remove the "character".
I understand in the industry there are some engineers that are good enough to selectively apply auto-tune, to only fix obvious issues, and avoid the pitfalls. There are also some productions that just apply auto-tune to everything with no consideration of the content. The later will probably work for glossy pop productions, but if I was a really good singer (or a singer with "character") I probably wouldn't like the results.
Thanks for the information, that's one product I'm not too familiar with. I've demoed the Antares product and a couple of freebies. (It seems like there is a couple of newer plugins out there as well, eg Synchro Arts Revoice Pro).
The problem is, I'm not sure though that even a pure alternate tuning can work though for all examples. EG: for blue notes, what is "correct" varies with performers and style.
Now, I'm more talking about the "automatic modes"; I understand Melodyne offers a pretty impressive level of editing control (Antares did too from what I remember). So it would certainly be possible to get a really great take, and then hand-correct any truly off notes to whatever frequency you wanted.
As in many things (see: Photoshop and model photos), a lot of the reaction to the tool is less on how it could be used, and more on how it is being used in glossy "crap singer pop idol" productions.
