Of French Mathematicians, AutoTune, and the Decline of Western Civilization
Read Time:3 Minute, 38 Second
Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician that, among his other work, came up with a very useful theorem.
This mathematical method, the Fourier Transform, states that complex functions can be broken down into individual parts of sine and cosine waves. Huh??
Now I know that people are already starting to glaze over a little with the first couple of sentences but I can explain it differently and it will give some interesting insight.
Think of a soup, say chicken noodle soup. When you taste the soup, you taste different things in the soup. It might be pepper, or celery, some chicken, salt.
In your mind you have taken something complex and broken it down into its separate parts.
That’s what a Fourier Transform does. Transforms something complex into it’s frequency parts mathematically.
Okay, here is a beautiful example. Your ears are performing a Fourier Transform in real time. WHAT??
Think about it. When you hear some music, you don’t hear a soup of sounds.
You hear the parts broken down automatically. When you hear some music playing, you automatically separate the drum from the guitar, the violin from the tuba.
Your ears and brain are performing this task automatically.
Your eyes can’t do this. They can’t separate the pieces of what you see. Mix red and white paint together and you will get pink paint. Your eyes and mind cannot separate the paint mix to get the parts.
But pluck the A string and the E string on a guitar and you hear both strings at the same time but still as separate notes.
Without this ability, music would not be possible!
Probably helped out a long, long time ago when a predator was sneaking up or a person was hunting prey and needed to distinguish a rabbit from a bear.
The Fourier Transform takes the soup and then breaks it down mathematically to what each spice is and how much was added to get that soup.
Okay, neat trick the ears can do. Name some other things.
One thing about the Fourier Theorem is that it is reversible.
You can separate the parts and then you can take the parts and rebuild what you had.
Lets again use the soup example. You can separate the parts, see all the spices that were used, then mix it all back together again to get what you had originally.
But say you separated the soup parts and decided that it was too salty. When you mix it back together, you only put back half the salt. Changed the soup taste.
Another thing that Transforms are used for is geology.
They will set up a controlled explosion and record the sound as it bounces around in the ground. Then they break that complex sound into its parts and check for patterns, etc to find layers of rock or even oil.
Then one day this geologist engineer came up with this idea, between explosions, that if I can break sound down into it’s parts and then put it back together, perhaps I can alter them before I mix them back to help people keep in tune.
Just change the parts so that the singing is brought up or down to the nearest semi-tone. This way singers in concert will give that perfect performance, even though they may be off a little in reality.
So that is what AutoTune does.
Singer is singing into microphone, AutoTune machine separates the pieces and figures which way the pieces need to go, up or down to be in tune to the nearest semitone, then mixes it back to send out to the audience without them knowing it.
Staying in the background, the AutoTune device would probably never be known about except for industry insiders.
But along came Cher and that one song “Believe” where the AutoTune was used to distort and change the voice so dramatically that it became the voice itself.
The sound engineer did it as a joke but it stuck, thus marking the start of popular music era I believe will be known as the “Age of the AutoTune”.
Oh what dismal times we live in. Abandon hope, all ye who AutoTune.
Except for this guy. Sorta catchy…
Song that I’ve been singing at work to annoy my co-workers. It’s a passive aggressive thing.
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
By the way, you can get a free software package that will do the “AutoTune” pitch correction. It is called AutoTalent.
http://web.mit.edu/tbaran/www/autotalent.html
Maybe MMA could start their very own singing group?
The “MAD MICS” ????
I sorta like “? & the Mad Mysterians”
I’m not even going to mention Pitch Correctors 😉
Nice can of worms you’ve opened up on Auto Tune, Krell. My feeling about it is sadly the same way I feel about what happens with most technology, it generally enables more mediocrity than it does genius… that being said Cory is right, -it’s just a tool. I should just blame the jackasses who abuse it…
After all, I’m sure the monks charged with “illuminating” bibles who saw the first rapidograph pens thought those were the end of everything virtuous and true as well.
-SJ
Well, I like your logic… don’t wholly agree … but I sure do like that you notice that there are differences between mediocrity and genius and that technology distinguishes between them…
or did I get it all wrong?
I’m still trying to hear waves…. in reverse. 🙂
Okay, here is the debate. Suppose you had a guitar that when you played it, you didn’t move your fingers. The strings automatically came to your fingers when you held them up. Not real of course, but this is just an example.
Would it produce better guitar players or would it create mediocrity?
It could really get into a in depth discussion of society and technology. For example, eye glasses can be considered a tool which helps a lot of people but probably doesn’t improve people’s eyesight without them. Does calculators produce better mathematicians? Do voting machines make more qualified voters?
I remember way back in the early 60s, Bob Dylan playing a concert. For a while it was one man and his acoustic guitar, then he picked up an electric guitar and started playing with a 6 piece band, part of the audience booed him. Not comparing Dylan and Auto Tune, but it just made me think of it.
It seems that as society grows more “advanced”, whatever that means, people are less inclined to accept who they are and the talents and skills that they have to work with.
Girls are becoming more pressured to get plastic surgery for the slightest perceived flaw, singers aren’t content with their own skills at singing, baseball players don’t like their performance so they take steroids, guys can’t deal with being 80 years old and not getting a wood so it’s Viagra, list goes on and on.
Krell really interesting.many analogies with telephony,combining multiple calls into a single digital stream then breaking them back out to their individual destinations (multiplexing) or DSL combining voice and data and using both simultaneously due to different frequency bands.
Digital Signal Processing, all kidding aside from the AutoTune, is amazing in it’s capabilities.
It is becoming so mainstream in everything that we see and use everyday. From the Digital TV broadcasts, the cell phones, bandwidth allocation like you talk about, enhancing images, etc.
I wish it was just easier to explain to the lay person so they could understand the technology of the world around them. I hoped that my crude “chicken soup” analogy did give some insight.It is possible to get an idea without some “glaze the eyes over” equation popping up.
Your chicken soup analogy is a good one, although your conviction that soup-based signal processing can be modulated by adding/removing salt may be all wet.
LOL! It only works if after removing the salt, you throw it over your left shoulder. (right shoulder if below the equator)
There are some people you really don’t want to listen, to so auto tune is best for them. I leave you with the name Barry Manilow as my first example and Micheal Bolton as another.
I absolutely detest the auto-tune sound (ala “Believe”). It causes a really visceral, negative reaction with me. I saw the Nova piece on this, it was interesting as hell.
I guess nearly all pop singers use this for live performances and also studio recording now.
I find it really gross.
I agree 100% with that detest statement, HelenWheels.
I thought it might be interesting to give a very rudimentary explanation of Digital Signal Processing, a process that AutoTune uses, and throw some humor in as well.
But the trouble with engineer humor is that it sometimes is not recognizable as such. Sorta like that “Is this mike on? Hello…Hello…” effect.
Definitely well done! I just start to fume whenever I think about it. No reflection on your fine piece!
Auto-tune can be treated as a musical instrument, just like anything else (barring things which produce no sound at all :P). Your complaint has been lodged, but it reminds me of the historical rejection of the piano forte at its creation.
Yes, talentless hacks will abuse their instruments for all time–so? How is it any different to play a guitar poorly than it is to autotune without talent?
3/5. Old youtube video, interesting topic, weird angle on the subject matter.
Because a guitar played poorly sounds like a guitar played poorly. But singers that rely on AutoTune, in my opinion, are not only cheating but losing the very soul of live music.
When I go to see a concert, I want to hear the performer PERFORM.
I do not want to see the performer dancing while a recording loop is being played. I want to be able to see what that performer can do, the way the song is sung, it’s nuances and inflections. If that person has talent, let them shine!
AutoTune creates cookie cutter performances, not emotional experiences. Can you imagine a Billie Holiday or a Janis Joplin AutoTuned to nice neat little performance? I think not.
Performers need to strive to achieve, not be lazy and robotic.
The video clip is done by a group called “AutoTune the News” which I believe is a parody of the more frequent use of AutoTune in everything that you hear.
With you at ‘Joseph’ and picked it up again at ‘thing’.
What was that bit in the middle again?….;-)