Have you Heard?
By Doug Robinson

Behind the curtain, manipulating music

Since we’re all staying indoors a bit more right now, I asked Atención if it wouldn’t mind printing a bonus music column this month to help us keep busy. So please read this several times, slowly, to get the full effect.

I had such a good time in the last column writing about James Taylor’s latest album Covers from a technological point of view that I find myself wanting to give anyone who is interested a more extended peek “behind the curtain” of modern music-making techniques. It won’t be as painful as watching sausage being made, but there are bound to be some similarities.

I also provide you with some internet links where you can hear these various techniques demonstrated, often to hilarious and/or deeply artistic effect.

A quick recap. In the old days, musicians would gather around a single microphone and play the song. Period. The recording studio was just a quiet place to capture a live performance. With the invention of multi-tracking (dividing a piece of recording tape into separate audio tracks, so a performer could lay down multiple parts himself and build a much more complex performance) that all changed. As I said before, it is now the exception for a pop or rock recording session to feature live performances from all the players at the same time. Today, these records are made over the course of many months, and the players can literally phone in their parts from different time zones. And you might never know the difference.

Okay, that’s about where I left off last time. AutoTune is the first of a handful of popular recording tricks that I think you might find interesting. 

AutoTune does pretty much what you’d think from the name—it takes a recorded tone and automatically tunes it up. This is extremely helpful for amateur vocalists who turn in a decent performance with a few clunkers. The engineer simply pats them on the back and sends them off to the lounge; then he goes to his computer, selects the bad notes and artificially brings them in line with what the Western world would consider “good pitch.”

When AutoTune is used subtly, it can save a bad performance and most won’t notice it. When it is used indiscriminately, it adds a robotic perfection to intonation. This is most common today in contemporary Rap and Country/Western Music, where less talented singers still aim for clear and clean sonic perfection. And even though AutoTune sounds unnaturally perfect, I suppose there is an audience that prefers it.

Now, I have to let you in on a little secret among the recording engineers I know personally: we all kind of hate AutoTune! Our job is to make a good recording—why isn’t it the artist’s job to sing it right? Some of the current pop stars actually use it in live performances, and the variance is set so tightly that they could practically sing the wrong melody from start to finish! But a sufficiently fast computer will grab each mistake and correct it before the sound reaches the audience’s ears.

So here we have a technique that was created to help in emergencies only and is today so common that you can’t avoid it. However, I just discovered a group of talented siblings who have taken AutoTune to a level of creativity that the inventors surely never imagined. I want to suggest you visit this URL on the internet to fully appreciate what they are doing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBb4cjjj1gI

This link routes to a YouTube video called “Autotune the News #2.” What these talented young people (the Gregory Brothers) have done is to compile news footage (about gay marriage, drug trafficking and the Somalian pirate crisis) and edit the voices of Hillary Clinton, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and Katie Couric so that they fit into extremely sophisticated vocal melodies. Silly, but it’s brilliant. Perhaps the creators insert themselves into the footage a bit too much, but we do get a segment where Katie Couric is delivering news about global warming and is actually dueting—in perfect harmony—with one of them. This has to be seen to be understood.

I can give you a thumbnail sketch of how it is done—first they edit the speech itself, chopping it up so that the commentators’ natural speaking cadences are synched to a musical backing track. Then the sound of the commentator speaking is fed into a computer, and, while listening, a musician plays a melody on a keyboard. (Often this is done one note at a time, since techies are not always the best keyboard players). The end result is that the commentator appears to be singing the melody that was played on the keyboard! (It may be the first and last time I’ve ever described Hillary Clinton as ‘funky’ in a good way.) I love that a tool I basically consider a scourge to professional music-making has been flipped on its head in a most professional manner.

Another tool that can be used for good or for evil is Beat Detective. Although BT is the name of a specific product, many software programmers have their own versions of the same concept, and the goal is always the same: to take a lousy drum performance and make it metronomically perfect. You might ask “Why don’t they just hire better drummers in the first place?” Please let me know when you come up with the answer to that one!

Part of the thrill of listening to Beatles records for me is Ringo’s lopsided grooves that speed up and slow down—we call it ‘breathing’ in musical terms. Technically, Ringo wasn’t a great drummer, but his unique feel on drums and percussion was an integral part of what made that band so special. But today, an engineer would simply ‘correct’ all the lovely imperfections and make the rhythm metronomically static from start to finish. Again, when good musicians hear this stuff, it makes us crazy. But, once again, I’ve got an example of a young artist who has used it to create a new artform, best demonstrated by this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqumbhfxRo 

What makes this so brilliant—and I really do mean that—is that the performer you’re watching cannot actually play either the piano or the drums, yet he has edited together a complex musical performance from a series of single notes, played with one finger on a piano and one stick on a drum. Using beat-correcting software, an amateur musician (with professional film editing skills) creates a whimsical song that could not have been produced any other way, not even with a room full of talented players. Is it music? I don’t know, but I like it.

These two examples of contemporary recording tools—AutoTune and Beat Detective—can be used to help mediocre performers sound great and at the same time can be used to help creative geniuses push the art of music-making into a new realm.


Doug Robinson is building a recording studio and plans to use these technological tools only for the good of mankind.

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