5 ms·

imagine thinking you can actually notice light autotune (let alone melodyne!) use in a recording

boomskats 4y ago
You also just _completely_ missed my point. I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use autotune. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use autotune. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice.
- Orcastrap 4y ago
  my point is that you're depriving yourself of good art for an arbitrary moralism. just as ridiculous as saying "i'll never listen to a singer that uses compression bc the artists i listen to MUST have perfect dynamics (even though this has zero impact on the final product)" im making fun of you for being silly
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    He says 'I' meaning he's choosing for himself for his own reason, he's not forcing it on others. You might at least respect that even if you, and I, don't share the reasoning.
  - boomskats 4y ago
    I never said I don't listen to it. I said I want the option of explicitly filtering it out sometimes. The two are entirely different.
- moth-fuzz 4y ago
  "I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use EQ. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use EQ. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice." Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. Regardless, whether or not a singer or producer uses a particular effect on their voice does not distinguish between the vocals being 'real' or not. If you simply don't like the way it sounds, on the level of artistic taste, well, you can make that judgement for yourself, but, to claim it's more profound than that is just pure pretense. Also, why are we talking about autotuned vocals on a thread about a speech synthesizer? Claims of 'real vocals' are already out the window at that point.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. If they don't make such choices for themselves, they're not much of an artist, more like mass-produced manufactured candy pop/r&b/etc...
    - Orcastrap 4y ago
      "if you're leaving artistic choices in the hands of someone else and aren't building your computer, DAW, and semi-conductors from scratch, all on your own, you're not much of an artist"
      - coldtea 4y ago
        This is some novel kind of cross between a strawman and a slippery slope fallacy, so full of bad faith that it isn't really worth an answer... Because of course there can't be a cutoff point, with my argument applying to the level of involvement I described (if one's vocals are to be processed with autotune or some major effect is a major thing for a vocalist to leave to others, even level of reverb or echo will often be a thing to debate with the producer/engineers) and not to ridiculous meta-levels like building your own DAW.
- eropple 4y ago
  I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". Perhaps there is also a standard mic for Vocal Realness. I assume it must be a SM58; it is, after all, well-known that having a low-pass switch on the microphone lowers the industry-calibrated Realness Score by at least 250 mSpr(ingsteen). More if it's on. edit: A friend also pointed out to me the inherent Springsteen ceiling of computer-reproduced audio. And you know, he's right, I'm going to go find a chamber and hire some monks for the true realness that only an authentic Gregorian chant can provide. Denon sells them in twelve-packs, you know.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". It's not based on some technical argument or law of physics. People either get why, or they don't. If you want some kind of technical justification, those effects you mentioned just add some sparkle (flanger) or fixes the balance (often just to make a recording, which begins deader in a sound-treated studio, sound closer to real life environment (reverb) and dynamics (compression). Autotune, on the other hand, changes the pitch and vibrato, you know two of the main things a singer is supposed to produce. And if overdone as "effect", it also fucks the timbre. And let's be real, nobody says this about some singer using autotune to fix a flat note or two. It's the autotune-as-effect (whether T-pain levels or more subtle) that people complain about.
    - eropple 4y ago
      I think you may have missed what I'm getting at here. I very much "get" why people don't like it, and most of the music I listen to regularly goes light on autotune/melodyne. And I am not saying that one has to like those vocals at all. But the idea that they're not "real vocals" is an attempt at shitty gatekeeping that has no place in music. This wannabe arbiter does not get to decide what "real" is or what "art" is. It's gatekeeping bullshit.
WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
Imagine thinking there aren't people with exceptional hearing that notice all sorts of things the average person doesn't.
- coldtea 4y ago
  It's sort of like thinking statistical outliers are relevant to a general argument.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Nadya 4y ago
  Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me - people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in. There are absolutely edits so subtle that without having seen or heard the original you'd have no way of knowing it was modified at all. Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. These kinds of subtle changes are far more common than the drastic and noticeable edits or even smaller but still quite large edits where people with a trained eye/ear will notice but the average person wouldn't.
  - WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
    > Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me Perhaps so. I'm not one of those people that picks up on (or claims to) these subtleties, so I wouldn't know. I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
  - boomskats 4y ago
    > people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in You're obviously entitled to share your opinion, but also I also find your strawman a little offensive. Vocal pitch correction is a very real and very noticeable category of processing, absolutely not the same realm of snake oil bullshit as $30,000 gold plated wires. If it was, it just wouldn't exist. Why would anyone ever take the time to write software that correct vocal tuning if it made zero perceivable difference to the output? > There are absolutely edits so subtle [...] Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. Nobody ever 'corrects someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step'. It just doesn't happen, human voice can't consistently hold a frequency to that resolution for more than a few milliseconds. For reference, a 1/4 step vocal oscillation is only considered 'moderate vibrato' [0]. Even a 1/128th pitch variation is rarely considered noticeable or consistent enough to correct. This is miles away from a '1/1400th' (which is also a very strange fraction to choose btw, even when you take harmonics into account). I posted this in another comment, but you should take a couple of minutes and take the MusicLab Tone Deafness test [1]. It'll give you an idea of what 1/64th variance sounds like, and how noticeable it is or isn't to your ears. [0] https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html [1] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td
boomskats 4y ago
Who thinks that? I certainly don't and never said I did. Nevertheless there is no 'light autotune' filter on any of the major streaming services either. There's a pretty interesting test[0] on themusiclab.org, that will test how good your microtonal perception is. See how you score - it might align with how well you're able to perceive autotune. Here's my score [1]. This was from my first attempt a few months ago, but I've done it a couple more times since and my score is pretty consistent - whether I like it or not. [0] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td [1] https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z

You also just _completely_ missed my point. I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use autotune. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use autotune. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice.

Orcastrap 4y ago
my point is that you're depriving yourself of good art for an arbitrary moralism. just as ridiculous as saying "i'll never listen to a singer that uses compression bc the artists i listen to MUST have perfect dynamics (even though this has zero impact on the final product)" im making fun of you for being silly
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  He says 'I' meaning he's choosing for himself for his own reason, he's not forcing it on others. You might at least respect that even if you, and I, don't share the reasoning.
- boomskats 4y ago
  I never said I don't listen to it. I said I want the option of explicitly filtering it out sometimes. The two are entirely different.
moth-fuzz 4y ago
"I want to be able to choose to consciously support artists who don't use EQ. I want to be recommended and discover new artists, who consciously don't use EQ. I want to be able to choose to listen to real vocals as a genre. I want that choice." Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. Regardless, whether or not a singer or producer uses a particular effect on their voice does not distinguish between the vocals being 'real' or not. If you simply don't like the way it sounds, on the level of artistic taste, well, you can make that judgement for yourself, but, to claim it's more profound than that is just pure pretense. Also, why are we talking about autotuned vocals on a thread about a speech synthesizer? Claims of 'real vocals' are already out the window at that point.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Note that many recording artists do not actually make that choice; it happens further up the chain. If they don't make such choices for themselves, they're not much of an artist, more like mass-produced manufactured candy pop/r&b/etc...
  - Orcastrap 4y ago
    "if you're leaving artistic choices in the hands of someone else and aren't building your computer, DAW, and semi-conductors from scratch, all on your own, you're not much of an artist"
    - coldtea 4y ago
      This is some novel kind of cross between a strawman and a slippery slope fallacy, so full of bad faith that it isn't really worth an answer... Because of course there can't be a cutoff point, with my argument applying to the level of involvement I described (if one's vocals are to be processed with autotune or some major effect is a major thing for a vocalist to leave to others, even level of reverb or echo will often be a thing to debate with the producer/engineers) and not to ridiculous meta-levels like building your own DAW.
eropple 4y ago
I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". Perhaps there is also a standard mic for Vocal Realness. I assume it must be a SM58; it is, after all, well-known that having a low-pass switch on the microphone lowers the industry-calibrated Realness Score by at least 250 mSpr(ingsteen). More if it's on. edit: A friend also pointed out to me the inherent Springsteen ceiling of computer-reproduced audio. And you know, he's right, I'm going to go find a chamber and hire some monks for the true realness that only an authentic Gregorian chant can provide. Denon sells them in twelve-packs, you know.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >I'm very curious how autotuned/melodyned vocals are not "real vocals", but vocals that have had EQ applied to them, or have been compressed or flanged or post-process reverberated or delayed, are "real vocals". It's not based on some technical argument or law of physics. People either get why, or they don't. If you want some kind of technical justification, those effects you mentioned just add some sparkle (flanger) or fixes the balance (often just to make a recording, which begins deader in a sound-treated studio, sound closer to real life environment (reverb) and dynamics (compression). Autotune, on the other hand, changes the pitch and vibrato, you know two of the main things a singer is supposed to produce. And if overdone as "effect", it also fucks the timbre. And let's be real, nobody says this about some singer using autotune to fix a flat note or two. It's the autotune-as-effect (whether T-pain levels or more subtle) that people complain about.
  - eropple 4y ago
    I think you may have missed what I'm getting at here. I very much "get" why people don't like it, and most of the music I listen to regularly goes light on autotune/melodyne. And I am not saying that one has to like those vocals at all. But the idea that they're not "real vocals" is an attempt at shitty gatekeeping that has no place in music. This wannabe arbiter does not get to decide what "real" is or what "art" is. It's gatekeeping bullshit.

WhiskeyChicken 4y ago

Imagine thinking there aren't people with exceptional hearing that notice all sorts of things the average person doesn't.

coldtea 4y ago
It's sort of like thinking statistical outliers are relevant to a general argument.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Nadya 4y ago
Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me - people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in. There are absolutely edits so subtle that without having seen or heard the original you'd have no way of knowing it was modified at all. Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. These kinds of subtle changes are far more common than the drastic and noticeable edits or even smaller but still quite large edits where people with a trained eye/ear will notice but the average person wouldn't.
- WhiskeyChicken 4y ago
  > Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me Perhaps so. I'm not one of those people that picks up on (or claims to) these subtleties, so I wouldn't know. I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
- boomskats 4y ago
  > people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in You're obviously entitled to share your opinion, but also I also find your strawman a little offensive. Vocal pitch correction is a very real and very noticeable category of processing, absolutely not the same realm of snake oil bullshit as $30,000 gold plated wires. If it was, it just wouldn't exist. Why would anyone ever take the time to write software that correct vocal tuning if it made zero perceivable difference to the output? > There are absolutely edits so subtle [...] Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. Nobody ever 'corrects someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step'. It just doesn't happen, human voice can't consistently hold a frequency to that resolution for more than a few milliseconds. For reference, a 1/4 step vocal oscillation is only considered 'moderate vibrato' [0]. Even a 1/128th pitch variation is rarely considered noticeable or consistent enough to correct. This is miles away from a '1/1400th' (which is also a very strange fraction to choose btw, even when you take harmonics into account). I posted this in another comment, but you should take a couple of minutes and take the MusicLab Tone Deafness test [1]. It'll give you an idea of what 1/64th variance sounds like, and how noticeable it is or isn't to your ears. [0] https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html [1] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td

boomskats 4y ago

Who thinks that? I certainly don't and never said I did. Nevertheless there is no 'light autotune' filter on any of the major streaming services either. There's a pretty interesting test[0] on themusiclab.org, that will test how good your microtonal perception is. See how you score - it might align with how well you're able to perceive autotune. Here's my score [1]. This was from my first attempt a few months ago, but I've done it a couple more times since and my score is pretty consistent - whether I like it or not. [0] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td [1] https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z