It’s very difficult to tell if autotuning is used, if it is used well.
I don't want to listen to artists who use autotune. I _do_ want to listen to artists who don't. I know that there definitely is a set of artists who explicitly don't use it, who are more concerned with accurately expressing their creative intent and musical virtuosity than they are with gaining popularity and mass appeal. What I am saying is that I would like to be able to consciously choose to only listen to and support those musicians, and I will gladly pay a disproportionate amount for it. Anecdotally, I know for a fact that I am not the only one who feels this way.
Also btw -
> when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular
Normally when you make a statement like this on HN I'd expect to see a citation or reference to where that statement came from.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
It's gatekeeping bullshit.
Do you have anything in mind that sounds misinformed? Or just can't fathom that anybody who can tell what a granular delay or an LFO or an automation envelope is can't possibly dislike Autotune?
Put frankly: your take is a small one. It's one that weakens the idea of art, and, no less importantly, is cruel and sabotaging to people. You should change your mind, but you're kind of glorifying in that cruelty and that smallness throughout this thread (which is gross!) so I will not be holding my breath for it.
Except if you thought that when complaining about autotune being bad, we were talking about some rare band that uses it as a creative tool, and not about the millions that use it as a clutch or for the 1000000th recreation of the same BS sound...
If I think it's "bad" then it has _zero_ value to _me_. Why does this bother you or anyone else?
And people can still be able to differentiate between stuff they merely don't like (taste) and stuff they consider detrimental to music in a larger way. In fact they might even like the latter and still consider them detrimental (e.g. I find some commercial pop tunes catchy, but consider them a bad musical and societal influence).
> But the idea that they're not "real vocals" is an attempt at shitty gatekeeping that has no place in music.
I'm not sure whether you see the irony in this statement. You're saying my opinion has no place 'in music'?
> This wannabe arbiter does not get to decide what "real" is or what "art" is.
I never claimed to be the arbiter of what art is. Art is subjective. It's a matter of personal preference. Like not wanting to listen to autotune.
Lastly, you seem really angry. I'm really sorry if anything I've said has upset you.
Man, this is basic Popper stuff. If you'd said "I don't like autotune", I'd have probably agreed with you. If you're saying that what others are doing aren't "real" because you don't like it, that's a whole different kettle of fish.
> I never claimed to be the arbiter of what art is.
You picked the word "real". Words mean things, and "real" does not mean "to my preference". It is a an assertion of legitimacy, it is that assertion to which all of my comments in this thread are directed, and it's something that neither you nor I get to take away from somebody.
> Lastly, you seem really angry. I'm really sorry if anything I've said has upset you.
I wouldn't say that I'm angry, I've been on the internet a long time and random posts have to be really special to do that, but I do write sharply when I care about something. If one believes genuinely in the openness and democracy of art--and I do--I don't think there's a properly strident reaction to the implications you laid down that wouldn't be a little bit testy.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is still art, I never claimed it wasn't. Deepfaked actors can still constitute 'art' (see Sassy Justice with Fred Sassy for a notable example). Photoshopped photos are still 'art'.
However, we don't refer to those 'real actors' or 'real photos'. They are examples of creative expression through manual editing. Photoshopped photos can be real art without being real photos, but there's a reason why National Geographic photographers don't crazy with the spot healing brush.
im making fun of you for being silly
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure the point of the Tone Deafness test - I scored a 31/32 but on many of the questions if one tone had been replaced with the lower/higher tone I'd never know it had been replaced despite my ability to tell them apart from one another. My point wasn't that you couldn't tell A from a very similar B (you can!) but that if A had been replaced by that similar B in the first place you'd never have known (because you couldn't!). You'd need to have been privy to the editing process to actually know if it had been edited at all.
Imagine an A/B test where A has been removed entirely and you've been asked which edits B has made to A. It's a very different test from an A/B test where you can compare A with B. While a trained ear may be able to hear obvious edits there are literally hundreds of non-obvious edits made to songs during production that you couldn't possibly know about without hearing the original recording to compare against.
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 [1] https://imgur.com/a/5R3K43Z
Then you have problem of the budget. Studio time is quite expensive and after nth take hard decisions have to be made. Booking another session or fix the tuning with software?
Also take into account that vocals that you hear in songs, that are not obviously autotuned may actually be composed of dozens of takes. That technique is called comping and the mixer (sometimes together with the artist) would choose the best take out of dozen often for each phrase or even single word. Sort of like natural autotune, when e.g. only phrases that sound in tune are picked.
Any examples? Are they all fairly small artists, or are there some big names who explicitly don't use it?
Not sure what you have in mind, but people don't need to listen to the top-20 or BS R&B.
Even if you want to listen to electronic music, there's a big universe of artists who have nothing to do with the "autotune" sound and modern commercial productions.
Tom Waits and Coldplay (or specifically, their mixing engineers) have gone on the record saying they use Melodyne in their marketing brochures.
Again, it is literally impossible for a human to know if pitch correction was used on a song. But if it's a song that was released after 2010 and mixed by an engineer, they used pitch correction, guaranteed.
[0] https://musicmarketing.ca/DNET/rack/brochure_melodyne_3.pdf
Not exactly. A guy who worked with them said it. They also have worked with dozens of others which would be where they used it. Also Waits recorded for 25+ years before Autotune (much less Melodyne) was even a thing.
And instead recorded the same piece several dozen times and for the final recording spliced together what sounded best.
This is like complaining that you don't want authors using spell check, they should have to retype the entire paragraph every time they make a mistake!
The end result is the same, the only difference is the path to get there.
There may be some fair complaints about usage at live shows, but for recordings, the end result is going to be the same if melodyne is used or if the artist is recorded again and again until everything is "perfect".
I think you are forgetting that the autotune IS their creative intent. T-Pain is probably the most famous heavy autotune user of all time, despite having an amazing voice without it. It's an intentional effect - like how electric guitars aren't "worse" because you aren't hearing the raw sound of the string.
If you can’t tell the difference, why do you care? If you can tell the difference, why do you need the label?
Speaking as an amateur musician, I think these arguments reflect a lack of understanding of how music production works, and how that’s connected to the artist’s creative vision. I’ll say that a big part of the blame lies with poorly used autotune. Just to pick an example, the entire first season of Glee is especially bad, to the point where I want to leave the room. Then there’s various places where autotune has been overused on singers who don’t actually need it to begin with (Bublé comes to mind), or where autotune has been used to cover up some sloppy singing. (Bublé is particularly illustrative—it is known that he uses autotune, but he has said that he doesn’t… I suspect that Bublé is simply unaware that autotune is being used. I suspect that many other singers are also unaware that they are being autotuned—but you can sometimes find clear evidence for it when you analyze their songs with a computer.)
But autotune is also used, manually, by producers, to make small adjustments as needed to improve a take. It can mean that the singer does fewer takes to nail the song, because with your comping and autotune choices, you get what you need faster. The amount of comping and autotune that you do is a matter of style and situation—producers are free to do comping and autotune as they see fit, to capture what they think is the best version of each part.
It means that you can say, “take 3 has the most beautiful phrasing and a lot of soul to it, it’s just a little sharp” and then manually adjust the pitch by the amount you think is appropriate.
> Normally when you make a statement like this on HN I'd expect to see a citation or reference to where that statement came from.
I’m not sure why you have that expectation or think that it is at all reasonable. Like everyone else, I have a lifetime of experience. Not everything that I tell you was written down in the first place, and I can’t reasonably be expected to remember the exact source for every piece of information, nor should I be expected to shut up just because I don’t provide a source for something I say.
I don't want to get halfway through listening to a song to hit autotuned vox. I just don't, I'd like the option to filter on that. I would like a recommendation/discovery engine that eliminates that anxiety.
> a lack of understanding of how music production works, and how that’s connected to the artist’s creative vision
Quite the opposite. I understand music production extensively. I studied it, I have used it, half my social circle are studio engineers or conservatoire grads. I just want the option of filtering on artists whose creative vision _is_ the original vocal recording.
> I suspect that Bublé is simply unaware that autotune is being used
The only reason that man has a career is because his geriatric target audience is too old to know what autotune is (hence his denial is plausible). I'm pretty sure his record sales depend almost entirely on the abuse of autotune for the hard of hearing. He isn't an example I'd have used in this argument.
> But autotune is also used, manually, by producers, to make small adjustments as needed to improve a take. It can mean that the singer does fewer takes to nail the song, because with your comping and autotune choices, you get what you need faster
I totally know and appreciate all of this. Recording without it is considerably more effort and money, it's often not economically viable. Nevertheless, I want to be able to sometimes filter on it.
> I’m not sure why you have that expectation or think that it is at all reasonable. Like everyone else, I have a lifetime of experience. Not everything that I tell you was written down in the first place
When your argument is your opinion or something drawn from your personal experience, that's fine. However your words were: "Fact is, people say this, but when artists actually release music that uses no autotuning, it tends to be less popular". Stating a 'counterintuitive fact' the way you did suggests it was proven in a study or experiment of some kind. When putting arguments like that forward, most posters on HN tend to reference their sources. Otherwise your 'fact' is just an opinion. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is not a 'fact'. If you state something is a fact, I think an expectation that you can back it up with an external reference is entirely reasonable.
> nor should I be expected to shut up just because I don’t provide a source for something I say
Not sure where I said that you were expected to shut up. If I implied it I apologise. However, I stand by my expectations of providing external references for things stated as fact.
Is “anxiety” the right word? This is an unexpectedly serious way to phrase things and I’m not sure I understand you correctly. If you’re viscerally bothered by the presence of autotuning, I can see why that must be very frustrating.
> I just want the option of filtering on artists whose creative vision _is_ the original vocal recording.
I think the idea of “original vocal recording” gets weaker the closer you look at it. You want something that’s not autotuned, fine. You want to logically explain your personal preferences in terms of preferring the “original” audio recording? The logic doesn’t hold up. That’s okay, you don’t need to logically explain your personal preferences.
In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. Pet peeve of mine. Maybe if you get a visceral reaction to bad autotune, I get a visceral reaction when someone explains the “logic” behind their personal preferences. It’s aesthetics. Maybe someone can bridge the gap between logic and aesthetics someday, but I haven’t yet met somebody who has succeeded.
> The only reason that man has a career is because his geriatric target audience is too old to know what autotune is (hence his denial is plausible).
The reason I brought up Bublé is because it illustrates that autotune is sometimes used even when the singer denies it, even when it’s unnecessary. Please don’t lay on the hate.
Gross.
The kind of artists worth listening to wouldn't touch autotune with a 1000ft pole. They're less popular to begin with - but can still have tens of millions of fans globally (say, someone like Tom Waits).
Whoops, bad news! Tom Waits' mixing engineer is explicitly mentioned in Melodyne's brochure.[0] Melodyne 3, too, so he's been using it for quite a while. You may want to shorten the length of that 1000ft pole.
[0] https://musicmarketing.ca/DNET/rack/brochure_melodyne_3.pdf
Which is not Tom Waits. A guy worked with 200 clients, has done gigs with Waits, and puts the most famous client names as ("has worked with"), not necessarily the one they used Melodyne on (which he doesn't even claim).
Well, I hope you don't like listening to any music made after ~2010, then. Melodyne is completely standard for any modern vocal processing, in all genres of music.
I get where you're coming from. I remember Celemony announcing their polyphonic tuning engine a little over a decade ago, and remember buying it as soon as it came out and re-tuning a load of Imogen Heap tunes and loving it, in something like Reaper v2. I know how prevalent Melodyne is, I know the commercial and production related justifications for its use. But I also know for a fact that this is not the case 'in all genres of music'.
Sometimes, I want to listen exclusively to music with real vocals. I love the first CHVRCHES album, it's one of my favourite albums of the last decade. As it happens, it took me ages, a couple of years, to figure out that the reason I liked it as much as I did was the lack of autotune. I (ironically) figured this out when they released their second album which _did_ utilise autotune. I never made it all the way through listening to that second album.
You may as well say "I don't listen to music that uses EQ" or "I don't listen to music that uses compressors."
Not the same as either of those things. You might as well be arguing that I'm claiming that volume knobs shouldn't exist.
Pick an equivalent like photography. In the photography world, EQ is like a fill light. A compressor you could compare to a polarising filter. Autotune (or drum quant) though, is like photoshopping. Removing all of the skin blemishes and imperfections at best, and at worst and more often than not, it's fake disproportionate waist and ass booty enhancement.
Compression is an effect that's applied. Selective tuning, like quantisation, is the result of an _interactive, selective edit_. It's the equivalent of photoshopping out the spots on my ass and making my hips a little narrower. Sure I could have not had that ingrown asshair, and maybe my hips would be narrower if I worked out. But the reality is different.
(Also IMHO ratio is a better single indicator of severity of compression, rather than dB)
> Compression is a uniformly applied filter. It's like a contrast adjustment or colour curve. It also affects amplitude only.
Very incorrect. Many famous compressors are known for the color (saturation, technically speaking) that they add to the sound. Hell, some are known for how badly they destroy the sound, like the Level-Loc. Analog-style compressors (which most engineers still use for vocals, in particular) also react very differently to different input gains, so it's not a uniformly applied filter.
> (Also IMHO ratio is a better single indicator of severity of compression, rather than dB)
It is not. Talking in terms of total gain reduction is more indicative of the effect on the sound. Using a 100:1 ratio (in practice, a limiter, something like Pro-L on Safe mode) is very common on vocals to catch quick peaks, but only catching a few dB of gain reduction. You won't notice that a limiter is being used on vocals this way. But you would notice if I used a 2:1 ratio on a vocal and set the threshold all the way down, crushing the dynamic range. You also can't talk about ratios when talking about using compressors in serial, which again, is standard vocal processing.
Recommend one, I'd appreciate it.
> Many famous compressors are known for the color (saturation, technically speaking)
Are you comparing colouration / saturation from a classic compressor to autotune?
I agree with you on most of the last paragraph. Thanks for the explanation.
An alternative you've also heard extremely often is a singer recording the same line 100 times, then producers going through each word (or each syllable) to cherry-pick the sample where it was most on-pitch and blend them together.
Neither one of these represents the singer's real ability (whatever that even means), but both can be unnoticeable by 99.99% of the population when applied skillfully.
That seems a bit too general. If we narrowed that down to a few popular music genres I would probably subscribe to it. Plenty of solo artists wouldn't be caught dead using autotune or melodyne or whatever (outside of using it for effect/intentional distortion). When being an exceptional singer is your entire brand, you don't want to show up with training wheels.
I mean, it's a joke, it's South Park. It's why I said 'jokes aside' in my next comment. However, if you're into jokes and such, I'd highly recommend that entire episode.
All jokes aside, I will throw serious money at the first streaming service that implements an 'autotuned' tag, and lets me filter anything tagged with it out of my stream. Like, $100 a month. Maybe more.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkMJ5GSC37g