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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

And it's awesome. Music shouldn't be singing olympics; self-expression and original ideas are worth more than technical skill.

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We disagree on that, and that's OK. To me there is something special about a live performance. Even more so when it's challenging for the performer. When a signer demonstrates range, or a musician displays technical excellence or provides emotional depth through expression it adds a LOT in my opinion. Knowing this is all faked in recorded music takes something away from it.

Ditto for photography. To take an image and retouch it, or to artificially saturate colors can make a great picture. But with a raw photo it's even more interesting to think that scene actually existed and someone captured it for us to look at.

In either case, I can enjoy the work but will only be impressed if I know that it's authentic. This is more true than ever today.

Holography, you can't currently fake that.

But then again, where do you draw this line for what is authentic and isn't?

In music are you allowed to use amplifiers and speakers? They can add a lot of color and distortion. How about reverb? Rooms that aren't there. EQ to remove unwanted frequencies? Synthesizers? Digital effects? At what point is it not authentic anymore?

Same for photography. Are you allowed to touch the aperture? ISO? Shutter speed? Flash? Digital camera? At what point is it not authentic?

The thing is, the subject of a photo, the scene and its subjects, are usually not the artists. The photographer is the artist. Photography is processing from the get-go: how the film or CCD responds to light and so on. The grain from low-light on sensitive film can be part of the art and so on.

If you mess with the colors of a scene, you're not taking away artistic control from that scene.

You also don't put limitations on the post processing art; you're not doing it to fool anyone.

There is post processing in music that is obvious art in an analogous way, like taking sampled sounds and re-mixing them to create new stuff. There are effects that are obviously effects. I'm not going to scoff at a great studio reverb, or some echo applied to a vocal or whatever. Nobody is saying that this was recorded in some fjord in Sweden with real echo bouncing off a distant ice wall; there is no lie.

In that case, we are just transferring artistic control from one human into another. In the past recording audio had fairly little artistic control and the subjects of the recording most of the control. Now with better audio manipulation software the person doing the recording has artistic tools at their disposal. They are the 'photographers' of the scene, while the singer is the subject.

That's right, and the subject might as well be a dog, or any other audio signal source, just like anything that reflects light can be a suitable one for the photographer's creative process. Cute puppies; water lilies; sunsets ...

The thing is, I somehow don't hear the studio's creative input either when I hear the latest auto-tuned Fido or Bowser. They're just applying some automatic something that's supposed to make the dog sound like a more able dog.

This is like when people just batch apply the same color enhancement and sharpening of their Florida vacation pictures. I've seen one instance, I've seen them all.

This is where auto-tune actually can fall. Singing is not exactly all about hitting the "in equal temperament tune" note all the time.

Take the fantastic singer with great technical skill. Most pitch correction algorithms, as far as I know, are strictly based on equal temperament / 12TET. Fantastic singers are capable of hitting the right harmonics, some of which are not 12TET. Fantastic singers slide into notes, they use vibrato, they add "blue notes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_note). If you over-apply pitch correction, in other words, you could easily make a fantastic singer sound worse.

Let's also take the singer who is technically a bit pitch deficient, but has "character" that makes up for it. You don't want to make this type of singer too in-tune, either. Too much tuning might remove the "character".

I understand in the industry there are some engineers that are good enough to selectively apply auto-tune, to only fix obvious issues, and avoid the pitfalls. There are also some productions that just apply auto-tune to everything with no consideration of the content. The later will probably work for glossy pop productions, but if I was a really good singer (or a singer with "character") I probably wouldn't like the results.

That's not true, melodyne is capable of arbitrary tunings, and even has a feature where you can create custom scales.

Thanks for the information, that's one product I'm not too familiar with. I've demoed the Antares product and a couple of freebies. (It seems like there is a couple of newer plugins out there as well, eg Synchro Arts Revoice Pro).

The problem is, I'm not sure though that even a pure alternate tuning can work though for all examples. EG: for blue notes, what is "correct" varies with performers and style.

Now, I'm more talking about the "automatic modes"; I understand Melodyne offers a pretty impressive level of editing control (Antares did too from what I remember). So it would certainly be possible to get a really great take, and then hand-correct any truly off notes to whatever frequency you wanted.

As in many things (see: Photoshop and model photos), a lot of the reaction to the tool is less on how it could be used, and more on how it is being used in glossy "crap singer pop idol" productions.

>Music shouldn't be singing olympics; self-expression and original ideas are worth more than technical skill.

Only it's about neither, but more about hot bodies and rich marketing campaigns.

Depends on what kind of music you're listening to

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