[OT] autotune

[Walter Bright]

On 5/1/2022 6:44 PM, claptrap wrote:
> On Sunday, 1 May 2022 at 18:09:16 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/1/2022 9:31 AM, claptrap wrote:
>>> And 99.9% of the time you're listening to AutoTuned vocals you dont even know.
>>
>> It's gotten to the point where I can tell :-)
> 
> How do you know when you cant tell? You dont, you just assume because you spot 
> it sometimes you can always tell, you cant.

It leaves artifacts, and its use changes the style of singing.


> and the thing about singers being better in the 70s, it's not true, it's just 
> that we've forgotten 90% of the music and we only remember the good stuff. It's 
> natural selection. 20 or 30 years from now people will say the same about the 
> 2010s, because all the crap will have been forgotten and only the good stuff 
> remains. There's a name for it but I cant remember what it is.

Survivorship bias, yes, it's a real thing.


> I mean seriously look up the charts for a specific week in the 70s, or 80s or 
> whatever, most of it was awful. But we just remember the stuff that stood the 
> test of time.

There were a lot of awful songs, sure. But that's not what I'm talking about. 
I'm talking about the voice quality of the singer. It's not just hazy old 
memories of mine - this stuff is all available to listen to today at the click 
of a mouse, and the recordings are as high quality as today. You can hear and 
compare for yourself. May I suggest Roberta Flak, Karen Carpenter, Madonna, 
Robert Plant, Greg Lake, Jamie Somerville.

I've heard music executives on documentaries say they no longer look for good 
singers, because they can fix their singing electronically. They look for 
someone who looks good and has charisma.

Singers today are autotuned and electronically "sweetened". It just doesn't 
sound natural.

(An extreme form of this is thrash metal singers who run their voices through a 
guitar effects pedal(!) but I'm not talking about that. There's also vocorder 
use, but that isn't trying to make the singer sound better.)