How Dr Andy Hildebrand invented AutoTune | Hacker News Reader

How Dr Andy Hildebrand invented AutoTune

irishtimes.com

35 pointsjohnc05515 comments

From the article: "There were other consequences from the adoption of Auto-Tune. Hildebrand tells the story of a music producer who jokes that once he used to look for good singers, now . . . it’s pretty faces."

This is the reason that a lot of recent popular commercial music is crap to my ears. A lot of the real talent is hidden by "cosmetic imperfections" and isn't suited for the mass marketing machine that desires pretty faces. If you go back before the modern era of digital manipulation, you'll be amazed at the vocal talent that is represented.

There's still plenty of legitimate vocal talent out there, but if you spend your time with your ears turned towards the noise machine of the big music distributors you might miss it.

The world is changing. Technology is making it easier for talented artists to make a living outside the traditional confines of the industry, even producing and distributing music themselves. The industry has fallen back to relying on the sorts of "media phenomenon" type artists (face, lifestyle, music, in that order) who get the greatest boost from what the industry can provide and are thus the most dependent on that industry.

Someone with solid pipes and solid musical skills will find it easier to DIY their tours, albums, etc. and make a decent living while in complete control of their music. Someone who's just a face and an approximation of a singing voice who requires autotune, requires others to write their songs, requires a backup band, etc. that person is going to be welded to their producers like nobody's business. And their producers are going to use every tool at their disposal to ride them for everything their worth (publicity blitz, etc.) It doesn't help that modern broadcast radio is feckless and moribund.

It is amazing, these days, the extent to which a second or two glance allows me to categorize particularly a female talent within the "Hollywood ecosphere", for lack of a better term. Such guestimates are not 100% accurate, but once one gets away from the established A-list (particularly the older set, established before some of the latest "prettification"), they are pretty close.

This has been talked and written about time and again, but I also see appearance playing such a role in many work environments. I wonder to what extent the former may be reinforcing the latter.

I see similar selection bias in the popular music industry. Again, top talent may escape it (but have plenty of professionals around for makeup and whatnot), but below that level, looks are king or queen.

Note than when surgeons were barbers, the Sorbonne was awarding PhD's....

Aside from the staggering memorization load in Med School, I would think the typical STEM PhD involves more work, and more creative work, than the MD. Certainly a lot more writing.

My understanding is that it's common for PhDs to feel they worked harder to get their degree than MDs, and MDs laugh at this.

Don't forget that earning the degree only gets you half way to being a practicing doctor. It's a little like the difference between the police and the military, maybe.

While I don't mean to make light of the effort and prestige behind earning a PhD, I can't be the only one who expected this article to be about how a medical doctor originally invented the technology behind AutoTune, possibly to help people who had trouble hearing certain types of audio.

Still an interesting background for the tech, mind you, but not what I was expecting from Dr. Andy Hildebrand (rather than Hildebrand, PhD).

That's interesting. I work with many PhDs and always refer to them as Dr so-and-so in formal settings or introductions. Most of the doctors I know aren't MDs.

I do see your point though. There are quite a few doctorate degrees, and even in the professional field they aren't all referred to as Doctor (take a DDS for instance, Doctor of Dental Surgery).

I do too, when I'm speaking aloud. In my experience, though, when writing, the actual degree is listed(PhD, MD, EdD, JD, DDS, etc.), rather than the more generic "doctor".

edit: Just checked; the AP and Reuters style guides both seem to recommond only using Dr for Medical Doctors. That's probably where my memory comes from.

http://www.sandiego.edu/web/pdf/brief_ap_style.pdf http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php/D#doctor

My mistake, apologies. PhD would have made more sense.

I thought the guy's background was interesting. It shows the utility of software/computing for solving such diverse problems as oil exploration and poor pitch using similar techniques. I find that amazing.

The rule I was taught was that PhDs use the title Doctor in contexts related to their professional expertise, but not in generic social situations. Going by that rule, Doctor Hildebrand is perfectly correct in this instance.

FWIW, in the US JDs do not use the title of Doctor.

I want an Android app that will autotune my voice as a microphone so I sing quietly into it and midi out is sent autotuned realtime voice.

That's not how MIDI works. For the most part, it just carries Note On / Note Off / Velocity messages. There's provision for system-defined data. But MIDI's bandwidth, if I remember correctly, is only 31kbps, so it's not enough to carry sampled audio with any fidelity.

It would be ok for a 2 second delay. I want to sound like Darth vader.

MIDI doesn't pass audio streams at all. It's purely a message-passing protocol. Per the Wiki article:

MIDI's primary functions include communicating event messages about musical notation, pitch, velocity, control signals for parameters (such as volume, vibrato, panning, cues, and clock signals (to set the tempo)) between two devices in order to complete a signal chain and produce audible sound from a sound source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

Reply on news.ycombinator.com