imagine thinking you can actually notice light autotune (let alone melodyne!) use in a recording
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 but that if A had been replaced by that similar B in the first place you'd never have known (because you couldn't!).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
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.
im making fun of you for being silly
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.
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).
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?
> 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.