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In the sphere of music we observe that autotune impacted the voice of new generations of singers, making them align more towards the fake/uncanny valley, instea

In the sphere of music we observe that autotune impacted the voice of new generations of singers, making them align more towards the fake/uncanny valley, instead of autotune becoming better to get out of the uncanny valley. This effect is hypothesized to come from the abundance of autotuned voice exposure new singers impress and train their ears with starting from early age. This generates a self feeding loop which on a societal level shifts the location of the uncanny valley. Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned music will sound uncanny or off. Adam Neely made a interesting episode about this: https://youtu.be/yxX2u8iggYI https://youtu.be/yxX2u8iggYI (around 5:00) I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get on mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what it means for facial expressions to be uncanny. There is an argument to be made that due to economic reasons, eventually it will not pay off to invest into reaching 100% out of uncanny valley but rather a “good enough” implementation will gain mass traction and thus change perception of what the uncanny valley is. Old movies will be the uncanny valley.

skerit 5y ago
So people who are actually talented singers will sound weird in the future? Now that's dystopian. I honestly hear auto-tune pretty quick. It bothers me that other people don't seem to notice it so easily.
- siltpotato 5y ago
  Maybe not weird so much as not standard. For example, guitarists with good dynamics-control sound different than guitarists of arbitrary dynamics-control quality with a compressor/limiter at the front of their chain.
Gravityloss 5y ago
I think it's had the opposite effect - that people listen to old music a lot more. Even young kids know a lot of eighties music. New music has something uncanny about it and it's tiring to listen to. I think it's related to how it's mixed (for example guitars have a lot of bass) or how the tempo is quantized too.
323 5y ago
Also Instagram face filters, used to the point that when you meet the person in real life you don't recognize it.
parenthesis 5y ago
For the first time in my life, this year I have been listening to a lot of music with autotune all over the vocals (K-pop). Now when I listen to songs with non-autotuned vocals, even very small pitch variations really jump out for me in a really wonderful way. What's interesting is (assuming it's music I like) I have that wonderful reaction regardless of whether the singer is using pitch variations in a very precise expressive way, or whether, to the contrary, they just don't have good control of pitch. But I do really enjoy both. There's a Rick Beato video where he complains about the harmony vocals in Lenny Kravitz' Fly Away being autotuned - but I love that sound, it's great! The precise bluesy inflections in Labelle's Lady Marmalade, versus the autotuned perfection of Shinee's Lucifer (a song which reminds me of the former), versus the wonderfully out-of-tune vocal performance on Motley Crue's Live Wire --- it's all great. I would just worry about future singers growing up only listening to and copying and internalising the sound of autotuned vocals. But is that going to be the case, with such easy access to music from all eras?
freemint 5y ago
> Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned music will sound uncanny or off. Only if lockdowns continue for like half a generation. Otherwise people will not stop singing in person outside their family group. A more likely result is that the acceptable range just gets broader. Just as acceptable sexual orientations, etc more inclusive.
ArtWomb 5y ago
The fake Tom Cruise on TikTok, while not "photo-real" in any sense of the word, seems to overcome any uncanny valley effects through shear force of personality. We don't just observe the face, we react to the spirit behind it. In that case, the effects artist found "Vienna's foremost Tom Cruise impersonator" to provide the mocap. And then painstakingly mapped the face overlay to the emotional cues in musculature. And those seem to be the feature detectors we pick up on, rather than the highest fidelity.
- gfaster 5y ago
  So much of TikTok seems firmly in what might be considered the uncanny valley. Lots of just slightly speed up footage, advanced (but not perfect) tts, and video effects and filters are everywhere. I think we might just be getting better at tuning out the imperfections than anything else. Something to think about is what would you ten years ago think of that video? Would your brain smooth over the imperfections like you do today, or would it jump out and be nearly unwatchable?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get on mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what it means for facial expressions to be uncanny. I don’t think this will happen with CGI. For most people, the vast majority of music they consume is pre-recorded. Thus, whatever is common in pre-recorded music becomes their definition of music. However, with regards to faces and expressions, people still interact with real faces and expressions in real life and movies are just a small proportion of the faces and expressions they encounter. Thus real life will still set the baseline standard and won’t be able to be shifted like what happened to music.
Retric 5y ago
This has also happened with constant photoshopping of models in advertising and ubiquitous CGI in car commercials. I often get deep uncanny valley reactions from advertising which is extremely off putting, but I can only assume both advertisers and the general public are so used to this stuff they treat it as normal. Ex: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/6f/73/8c6f73cd70afbdea6a2fb98c9c98372c.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/6f/73/8c6f73cd70afbdea6a2f... I can’t help but see this and think vampires, though that might be intentional.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  Your example seems interesting, it reminds me of Blade Runner that I recently watched for the first time. The style should be used sparingly and for specific purposes, though - like teal and orange color grading in blockbuster movies isn't (is that getting better recently?).
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > constant photoshopping of models There was one adult site I went on once where the pictures of all the models had their eyes photoshopped to be extremely white. Like, #FFFFFF white. Also, the saturation of the irises was turned way up, not to mention directed straight ahead. It was absolutely creepy. I look at that, and I look at many of the posts to /r/InstagramReality [0], and I have to wonder...who actually thinks this looks good? A minor touch-up is one thing, but so many people filter themselves to look like entirely different people, and they all look the same.
hairofadog 5y ago
I talked with a friend about a phenomenon I see more often in recent family photos which is a mouth-only smile while the with rest of their face the subject appears to be wishing they were somewhere else, or that they would like the camera-person to tell them whether they have broccoli in their teeth. My friend suggested (correctly, I think) that it's because when we were kids our parents weren't taking our pictures literally hundreds of times per day. It's not just that they're having their pictures taken, but that they're being asked to light up the room with a smile every time, and it's tiring. However, your comment made me wonder whether that uncanny, dead-eyed smile might become more normal or even something to strive for. I don't really think it'll happen but imagine a group of friends being like, "hey, Suzn, why's your smile so over-the-top all the time in our selfies?"
- bovermyer 5y ago
  I've discovered a weird but related phenomenon. At some point, I started consciously trying to true-smile (including the eyes, among other things) for all appropriate photos. After awhile, I realized that it was having a positive effect on my mood. I don't know if there's some study around that, but it appears that the process of trying to genuinely smile _created_ a positive mood, rather than resulting from one.
  - prerok 5y ago
    This is a known phenomenon: https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/06/the-real-health-benefits-of-smiling-and-laughing/ https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/06/the-real-health-benef... Though, I do remember reading about a collection of studies that failed to reproduce and this was one of the hypotheses. Perhaps the difference is that you genuinely wanted to smile :)
omnicognate 5y ago
> Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned music will sound uncanny or off. Yeesh, what a horrifying thought. Fortunately, I really don't think that will happen. We are exposed to real voices all the time, and we each have one of our own. The "inaccuracies" that autotune obliterates carry character and meaning, and I think there's already the beginnings of a push back against the homogenised corporate sound even beyond the part of the population that never liked it in the first place. It has its place but it's an "effect", not an "improvement", and it can't turn a bad singer into a good one. Maybe some sort of neural hybrid audio thing like the article discusses for graphics could, though...
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I don't think anyone thinks autotune sounds normal, especially when used heavily. They just think it sounds good. Sounding like a natural human is not a requirement, or even a goal for most music. Just as guitar players have been using a myriad of effects pedals for decades, some of which create sounds barely recognizable as guitar. Which reminds me of the MXR talk box which combines vocals and guitar, perhaps most famously used by Peter Frampton and Bon Jovi. This also reminded me of an older musician I knew that lamented all use of amplification in music. He thought that if the musicians were not moving the air themselves with their own bodies or instruments, then they were giving up some level of purity. I can understand that perspective, and to me overusing auto tune has the same problem, but I don't think the uncanny valley applies here.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  I think it sounds normal provided the singer is already close to the correct pitch. The only difference I hear is that now the singing sounds better.
  - bckr 5y ago
    There are at least two uses for autotune: 1) making a voice sound artificial, like that Cher song[] 2) Making a voice sound correct. The GP is talking about 1,while you're talking about 2. [] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      I'm not so sure. Heavily can either mean that they had to correct the pitch from a long distance or it could mean that a lot of the song had to be pitch corrected.
      - jiaaro 5y ago
        Usually “heavy” autotune refers to using a very fast pitch correction speed, which is what creates the pitch snapping effect
wantsanagent 5y ago
Also see: makeup.
999900000999 5y ago
At least for hip hop, I'm definitely not seeing this. Maybe some mainstream stuff will heavily use auto tune, but even acts which are mainstream, like Nas have no need for it. By and large it just depends on what you're in the mood for. Something I love about the internet is how easy it is to find niche music.
dahart 5y ago
Not exactly what you’re thinking of, but there is a certain way this already happened: 24 FPS movies. Us old timers who grew up watching movies on actual film all think that higher frame rates look like BBC television. Our kids grew up with 60fps games and YouTube and 120fps interpolating TVs don’t mind high frame rates and don’t think they look weird, but they sometimes notice how choppy and low-tech 24 fps film looks. (Even though I’m partial to film, these days I hate it when there are horizontal pans in 24fps film, they are unwatchable messes. This didn’t used to bother me when I was younger.) So it’s not exactly uncanny valley, but old movies are now in the not-as-good zone. I guess maybe color film really did the same thing a generation earlier, and now washed out colors are a solid ‘retro’ indicator.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  As a young person it blows my mind that people still make content at 24 fps when 24 doesn't every divide 60.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    24 is the right balance for a lot of things. Primarily - cost (everything gets more expensive the higher you go e.g CG, grading etc..) - lighting gets harder at higher frame rates since you have to be shoveling a lot more light in scenarios where you need to be close to open shutter - style, because so many people are used to 24 Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      >Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios. Maybe the industry in used to it, but for me it just makes it more of a choppy mess.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Why 60 specifically? (I’m aware of some good reasons, of course, but always good to examine the assumptions and question the goal. Europe was at 50, we have some US movies at 48, TVs and some games are now going to 120. Should 60 really be the goal?) One reason 24 is still here is that there’s been a lot of howling and complaining whenever people try to use high frame rates on movies. A lot of people didn’t like the 48fps Hobbit movies because of the high frame rate (and surely not because of the many boring orc battles). It doesn’t help that the “experts” with strong/loud opinions tend to be older people who prefer the old low FPS style. But, quietly and surely, things are trending in the higher frame rate direction. As the young people become accustomed to it with online video and TVs that interpolate by default, and the old people who prefer 24fps become the relative minority of the market, the standard will swing.
yowlingcat 5y ago
> I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get on mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what it means for facial expressions to be uncanny. I like this comment and have had similar conversations with friends lately -- to your point, it looks like this phenomenon is already happening on TikTok where body language is modulating to emulate uncanny valley CGI.
kingcharles 5y ago
It is fascinating to me how much we are influenced by the things we see and hear. I can practically detect which women I meet are active users of TikTok because they display certain nuances and tics which are fairly specific to women who upload videos to that platform. It doesn't bother me, but it is interesting from an ethnographic POV.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Behavior specific to a cultural group is... the norm everywhere. Group norms are how you learn what you're supposed to do. There's a famous result showing that Japanese women pitched their voices higher when speaking (native) Japanese than they did when speaking (acquired) English.
ericmcer 5y ago
But in the case of music people to listen to very little live music and a huge amount of recorded music. It is pretty dystopian to imagine a future where we interact with very few real faces and huge amounts of CGI ones.
- probably_wrong 5y ago
  That's not the future, that's already happening. And you don't even need to get into "Hatsune Miku" territory. I was listening to the radio the day after a local Madonna concert, and plenty of people called to mention how old she looked. Sure, she's in great shape for someone over 60 (hell, she's in better shape than me), but with her music being auto-tuned, her pictures and videos being photoshopped, and her public appearances being heavily orchestrated, the "public" Madonna looks and sounds a lot different than the "real" one. Most people where expecting someone in their early 40s. And she's far from being the only one.

skerit 5y ago

So people who are actually talented singers will sound weird in the future? Now that's dystopian. I honestly hear auto-tune pretty quick. It bothers me that other people don't seem to notice it so easily.

siltpotato 5y ago
Maybe not weird so much as not standard. For example, guitarists with good dynamics-control sound different than guitarists of arbitrary dynamics-control quality with a compressor/limiter at the front of their chain.

Gravityloss 5y ago

I think it's had the opposite effect - that people listen to old music a lot more. Even young kids know a lot of eighties music. New music has something uncanny about it and it's tiring to listen to. I think it's related to how it's mixed (for example guitars have a lot of bass) or how the tempo is quantized too.

323 5y ago

Also Instagram face filters, used to the point that when you meet the person in real life you don't recognize it.

parenthesis 5y ago

For the first time in my life, this year I have been listening to a lot of music with autotune all over the vocals (K-pop). Now when I listen to songs with non-autotuned vocals, even very small pitch variations really jump out for me in a really wonderful way. What's interesting is (assuming it's music I like) I have that wonderful reaction regardless of whether the singer is using pitch variations in a very precise expressive way, or whether, to the contrary, they just don't have good control of pitch. But I do really enjoy both. There's a Rick Beato video where he complains about the harmony vocals in Lenny Kravitz' Fly Away being autotuned - but I love that sound, it's great! The precise bluesy inflections in Labelle's Lady Marmalade, versus the autotuned perfection of Shinee's Lucifer (a song which reminds me of the former), versus the wonderfully out-of-tune vocal performance on Motley Crue's Live Wire --- it's all great. I would just worry about future singers growing up only listening to and copying and internalising the sound of autotuned vocals. But is that going to be the case, with such easy access to music from all eras?

freemint 5y ago

> Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned music will sound uncanny or off. Only if lockdowns continue for like half a generation. Otherwise people will not stop singing in person outside their family group. A more likely result is that the acceptable range just gets broader. Just as acceptable sexual orientations, etc more inclusive.

ArtWomb 5y ago

The fake Tom Cruise on TikTok, while not "photo-real" in any sense of the word, seems to overcome any uncanny valley effects through shear force of personality. We don't just observe the face, we react to the spirit behind it. In that case, the effects artist found "Vienna's foremost Tom Cruise impersonator" to provide the mocap. And then painstakingly mapped the face overlay to the emotional cues in musculature. And those seem to be the feature detectors we pick up on, rather than the highest fidelity.

gfaster 5y ago
So much of TikTok seems firmly in what might be considered the uncanny valley. Lots of just slightly speed up footage, advanced (but not perfect) tts, and video effects and filters are everywhere. I think we might just be getting better at tuning out the imperfections than anything else. Something to think about is what would you ten years ago think of that video? Would your brain smooth over the imperfections like you do today, or would it jump out and be nearly unwatchable?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> I wonder if we will observe something similar in acting and social interaction, where more and more bad or CGI acting gets corrected by uncanny valley methods, which new generations get on mass exposed with and thus change their own habits and what it means for facial expressions to be uncanny. I don’t think this will happen with CGI. For most people, the vast majority of music they consume is pre-recorded. Thus, whatever is common in pre-recorded music becomes their definition of music. However, with regards to faces and expressions, people still interact with real faces and expressions in real life and movies are just a small proportion of the faces and expressions they encounter. Thus real life will still set the baseline standard and won’t be able to be shifted like what happened to music.

Retric 5y ago

This has also happened with constant photoshopping of models in advertising and ubiquitous CGI in car commercials. I often get deep uncanny valley reactions from advertising which is extremely off putting, but I can only assume both advertisers and the general public are so used to this stuff they treat it as normal. Ex: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/6f/73/8c6f73cd70afbdea6a2fb98c9c98372c.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/6f/73/8c6f73cd70afbdea6a2f... I can’t help but see this and think vampires, though that might be intentional.

ahartmetz 5y ago
Your example seems interesting, it reminds me of Blade Runner that I recently watched for the first time. The style should be used sparingly and for specific purposes, though - like teal and orange color grading in blockbuster movies isn't (is that getting better recently?).
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> constant photoshopping of models There was one adult site I went on once where the pictures of all the models had their eyes photoshopped to be extremely white. Like, #FFFFFF white. Also, the saturation of the irises was turned way up, not to mention directed straight ahead. It was absolutely creepy. I look at that, and I look at many of the posts to /r/InstagramReality [0], and I have to wonder...who actually thinks this looks good? A minor touch-up is one thing, but so many people filter themselves to look like entirely different people, and they all look the same.

hairofadog 5y ago

I talked with a friend about a phenomenon I see more often in recent family photos which is a mouth-only smile while the with rest of their face the subject appears to be wishing they were somewhere else, or that they would like the camera-person to tell them whether they have broccoli in their teeth. My friend suggested (correctly, I think) that it's because when we were kids our parents weren't taking our pictures literally hundreds of times per day. It's not just that they're having their pictures taken, but that they're being asked to light up the room with a smile every time, and it's tiring. However, your comment made me wonder whether that uncanny, dead-eyed smile might become more normal or even something to strive for. I don't really think it'll happen but imagine a group of friends being like, "hey, Suzn, why's your smile so over-the-top all the time in our selfies?"

bovermyer 5y ago
I've discovered a weird but related phenomenon. At some point, I started consciously trying to true-smile (including the eyes, among other things) for all appropriate photos. After awhile, I realized that it was having a positive effect on my mood. I don't know if there's some study around that, but it appears that the process of trying to genuinely smile _created_ a positive mood, rather than resulting from one.
- prerok 5y ago
  This is a known phenomenon: https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/06/the-real-health-benefits-of-smiling-and-laughing/ https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/06/the-real-health-benef... Though, I do remember reading about a collection of studies that failed to reproduce and this was one of the hypotheses. Perhaps the difference is that you genuinely wanted to smile :)

omnicognate 5y ago

> Eventually, to the vast majority of people, old not-autotuned music will sound uncanny or off. Yeesh, what a horrifying thought. Fortunately, I really don't think that will happen. We are exposed to real voices all the time, and we each have one of our own. The "inaccuracies" that autotune obliterates carry character and meaning, and I think there's already the beginnings of a push back against the homogenised corporate sound even beyond the part of the population that never liked it in the first place. It has its place but it's an "effect", not an "improvement", and it can't turn a bad singer into a good one. Maybe some sort of neural hybrid audio thing like the article discusses for graphics could, though...

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I don't think anyone thinks autotune sounds normal, especially when used heavily. They just think it sounds good. Sounding like a natural human is not a requirement, or even a goal for most music. Just as guitar players have been using a myriad of effects pedals for decades, some of which create sounds barely recognizable as guitar. Which reminds me of the MXR talk box which combines vocals and guitar, perhaps most famously used by Peter Frampton and Bon Jovi. This also reminded me of an older musician I knew that lamented all use of amplification in music. He thought that if the musicians were not moving the air themselves with their own bodies or instruments, then they were giving up some level of purity. I can understand that perspective, and to me overusing auto tune has the same problem, but I don't think the uncanny valley applies here.

charcircuit 5y ago
I think it sounds normal provided the singer is already close to the correct pitch. The only difference I hear is that now the singing sounds better.
- bckr 5y ago
  There are at least two uses for autotune: 1) making a voice sound artificial, like that Cher song[] 2) Making a voice sound correct. The GP is talking about 1,while you're talking about 2. [] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    I'm not so sure. Heavily can either mean that they had to correct the pitch from a long distance or it could mean that a lot of the song had to be pitch corrected.
    - jiaaro 5y ago
      Usually “heavy” autotune refers to using a very fast pitch correction speed, which is what creates the pitch snapping effect

wantsanagent 5y ago

Also see: makeup.

999900000999 5y ago

At least for hip hop, I'm definitely not seeing this. Maybe some mainstream stuff will heavily use auto tune, but even acts which are mainstream, like Nas have no need for it. By and large it just depends on what you're in the mood for. Something I love about the internet is how easy it is to find niche music.

dahart 5y ago

Not exactly what you’re thinking of, but there is a certain way this already happened: 24 FPS movies. Us old timers who grew up watching movies on actual film all think that higher frame rates look like BBC television. Our kids grew up with 60fps games and YouTube and 120fps interpolating TVs don’t mind high frame rates and don’t think they look weird, but they sometimes notice how choppy and low-tech 24 fps film looks. (Even though I’m partial to film, these days I hate it when there are horizontal pans in 24fps film, they are unwatchable messes. This didn’t used to bother me when I was younger.) So it’s not exactly uncanny valley, but old movies are now in the not-as-good zone. I guess maybe color film really did the same thing a generation earlier, and now washed out colors are a solid ‘retro’ indicator.

charcircuit 5y ago
As a young person it blows my mind that people still make content at 24 fps when 24 doesn't every divide 60.
- dagmx 5y ago
  24 is the right balance for a lot of things. Primarily - cost (everything gets more expensive the higher you go e.g CG, grading etc..) - lighting gets harder at higher frame rates since you have to be shoveling a lot more light in scenarios where you need to be close to open shutter - style, because so many people are used to 24 Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >Also everyone in the industry is used to 3:2 pulldowns and the like to work with indivisible ratios. Maybe the industry in used to it, but for me it just makes it more of a choppy mess.
- dahart 5y ago
  Why 60 specifically? (I’m aware of some good reasons, of course, but always good to examine the assumptions and question the goal. Europe was at 50, we have some US movies at 48, TVs and some games are now going to 120. Should 60 really be the goal?) One reason 24 is still here is that there’s been a lot of howling and complaining whenever people try to use high frame rates on movies. A lot of people didn’t like the 48fps Hobbit movies because of the high frame rate (and surely not because of the many boring orc battles). It doesn’t help that the “experts” with strong/loud opinions tend to be older people who prefer the old low FPS style. But, quietly and surely, things are trending in the higher frame rate direction. As the young people become accustomed to it with online video and TVs that interpolate by default, and the old people who prefer 24fps become the relative minority of the market, the standard will swing.

yowlingcat 5y ago

kingcharles 5y ago

It is fascinating to me how much we are influenced by the things we see and hear. I can practically detect which women I meet are active users of TikTok because they display certain nuances and tics which are fairly specific to women who upload videos to that platform. It doesn't bother me, but it is interesting from an ethnographic POV.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Behavior specific to a cultural group is... the norm everywhere. Group norms are how you learn what you're supposed to do. There's a famous result showing that Japanese women pitched their voices higher when speaking (native) Japanese than they did when speaking (acquired) English.

ericmcer 5y ago

But in the case of music people to listen to very little live music and a huge amount of recorded music. It is pretty dystopian to imagine a future where we interact with very few real faces and huge amounts of CGI ones.

probably_wrong 5y ago
That's not the future, that's already happening. And you don't even need to get into "Hatsune Miku" territory. I was listening to the radio the day after a local Madonna concert, and plenty of people called to mention how old she looked. Sure, she's in great shape for someone over 60 (hell, she's in better shape than me), but with her music being auto-tuned, her pictures and videos being photoshopped, and her public appearances being heavily orchestrated, the "public" Madonna looks and sounds a lot different than the "real" one. Most people where expecting someone in their early 40s. And she's far from being the only one.