Vintage

The Photoshop of music has arrived. Just as Photoshop has given photographers the ability to make anyone look beautiful, new software called Melodyne can touch up any music recording to make it flawless.

Direct Note Access is a shocking new technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can now identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. This new software can identify pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes within chords. What we could only do with MIDI files previously, we can now do with regular audio files.

For example, you could record yourself playing guitar and later change a major chord into a minor chord with a click and a drag of the mouse.

This video from the Celemony company demonstrates the technology....

The use and abuse of technology in music recording

When I first heard about this months ago I thought it was a hoax. Even the technology's inventor says that it's theoretically impossible, "but what may be impossible in theory, is possible in reality."

This means that just about everyone could make a "flawless" recording. It will change music recording forever. I am sure that the big record companies of the world who market pop stars are thrilled. Now they truly don't need talent, just marketable good looks (and those can be Photoshop'ed anyway).

The benefits of this technology are not lost on me. I am sure that the technology has incredible creative potential, especially for artists who work with looping and sampling. It would also be highly valuable to independent bands with limited resources who pay for their own studio time to record their albums. One little wrong note could easily be fixed later, saving the band money on studio time. One or two takes of each song would be all that's required.

But the very existence of this technology leaves much room for abuse, and we can be sure that it will be taken advantage of, and that the existence of this technology will not be highly publicized outside the music world. People want to feel that their favourite pop stars can actually sing, which is why most people are unaware that many big-name concerts are faked -- even though it's common knowledge in the music world.

Like nuclear technology: It's not the technology itself that is dangerous, it's how we use it.

Could it be possible that this technology may actually make live performance more popular? People might want to see with their own eyes if the musicians can actually perform what they record. But of course they've already figured out how to fake live performance with lip syncing, as most pop music stars do today.

If you don't know how to sing, or play your instrument well, should you invest in Melodyne? Or music lessons?

Fellow musicians of the world: We are needed just a little less today.

History of Auto-Tune Technology

The origins of auto-tune technology began in 1935 when Bell Lab's scientist, Homer Dudley, filed a patent for a "signal transmission" device. This device included the essential technology which inspired all the others following.

Bell Labs turned this technology into a speech synthesizer and presented it at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. In the 1940s vocoder amps were being used in World War II by the likes of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt to encrypt conversations and prevent interception of messages from the enemy.

In the 1970s vocoders and "talk boxes" were used in music to create robotic sounds. Some examples include Stevie Wonder (Music of My Mind album), Kraftwerk (Autobahn), and Peter Frampton, who hooked his guitar up to a vocoder and suddenly found himself famous.

Somehow the wizardry of the scientific mind turned the technology behind these robotic voices into software that can alter the pitch of a single recorded instrument or voice -- known as Auto-Tuning. Probably the most famous use of auto-tune software is in Cher's hit, Do You Believe In Love? where her voice rises and lowers in pitch in a robotic manner. This song is often used as a prime example of the abuse of auto-tune technology.

But now, with the new Melodyne software, the technology can recognize not just a single pitch, but each individual note in a chord. For example, if I recorded myself strumming a C Major chord (which includes the notes C, E, and G all at once), the software can pick out each note and allow me to tweak them individually. So for example, I could click and drag the E-natural and make it an E-flat, thus changing the character of the chord from E Major to E Minor. It's essentially the holy grail of music nerd software.

More video worth watching

Another video demonstrating Melodyne is this one on Youtube called, Melodyne - Sing Like a Pro. It shows just how easy it is to create and alter a song, to "perfect" someone's vocal performance, and to use samples by stretching the tempos and changing the pitches.

A good illustration of the difference between natural vocals and "tuned" vocals is given in this video called How to tune vocals. The man singing has a decent voice to begin with so it's an interesting comparison.

Rumours that the technology is impossible

Digging deeper into this story, there were rumours spreading on the Internet that this technology is impossible, that "Direct Note Access" (DNA) doesn't work as they claim it does, and that the video demonstration by Peter Neubäcker uses a mock-up of proposed technology for live demos, and that, "in reality, producing a fully working version is proving to be impossible."

But Create Digital Music, a popular blog on digital music technology, has done research on the subject and even spoken with the people at Celemony, and he says that the rumour is busted: Celemony's Magical Melodyne Direct Note Access Still Real, Coming Soon.

Celemony invites anyone to download the demo version of the software and try it out for themselves on their own recordings.

• See Also: When is a singer not a singer?