Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Sunday, 1 May 2022 at 18:09:16 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> What has happened is the *style* of singing has changed to 
> accommodate use of autotune. This becomes most apparent if you 
> listen to a lot of singers in the 1970s vs today. Modern 
> singers also, since they don't have to train to be on pitch, 
> don't seem to train to develop a good tone, either. Their 
> voices just don't have good tone compared to 70's singers.

It is true that there are styles inspired (or defined) by 
pitch-correction, actually some singers are so nimble and pitch 
perfect that people refuse to believe that they don't use pitch 
correction! However, if you are talking doing minor adjustments 
in post production you would be better off using spectral tools.

Auto-tune did not invent pitch correction, the author of the 
software didn't discover something obvious as you claimed, it 
might have been the first marketable successful product, but the 
concept was there beforehand and was well known.

The basics for a phasevocoder isn't all that complex, you do an 
FFT then you detect the peaks, then you move the peaks, adjust 
the phases and do an inverse FFT. (If you shift far you have to 
correct the peaks to avoid an effect that sounds like Mickey 
Mouse). There are a couple challenges though, one is that 
consonants and other complex transients get smeared, so you have 
to fix that with some hack. You also have the issue of tracking 
pitch correctly, which I believe is where Autotune cut costs by 
doing pitch tracking by autocorrelation more cheaply. That is a 
technical improvement, not a conceptual one.