Auto-Tune the TechStuff

little listener mail. This little listener mail comes from Charlie. Hey, Charlie, sorry at a little unicorn moment there, says okay, you haven't seen that video? All right, Charlie the unicorn. We're watching it after this episode. Hi guys, I'm a big fan and longtime listener. I've been noticing a lot of positions have been using something known as auto tune more prominently than ever lately. How does this work? Is this a new technology? Keep up the great work, Charlie, so um.

Auto tune has been around for a while, as it turns out, and another podcast covered this briefly, and it wasn't high speed stuff. Although they do talk about autos and tuning. It was stuff from the B Sides, which had an episode about auto tuning, but we were going to cover it as well. So auto tuning is also known as pitch correction. Yes, it's when it's it's being

able to do digitally nudge a person's voice. So it's closer to being on pitch um Now in the good old days, and by the good old days, I mean the old in the old days, what you would do is you get a group of musicians in the studio and you would start recording tracks, and whenever the lead vocalist would uh would flub a note, you would just make a mark of that and you would do another take, and you do another take, and you do another take, and even for the ones that sounded good all the

way through, you would do extra takes and then you would cobble together the best sounding song from those multiple takes using actual editing UH procedures. Yes um. Speaking as someone who's gone through this process, I can tell you it's not not nearly as much fun as it sounds, and it doesn't really sound like all that much fun.

And before digital techniques, we're talking about things like splicing sections of tape together with you know, a razor blade and and you know, splicing material, trying to get it so that you have one long, continuous take that is in tune right, and you have to be very careful to make sure it's all matched up just right so that you can't detect the break beaus taking pains, taking work, and before that, you're pretty much just stuck with whatever

you got ding. Like if if if you were recording, especially on something like say, I don't know a wax cylinder, it didn't matter if you flubbed it. That was how that was gonna go out, warts and all all. But But as as we began to get better at editing music, are standards started to go up, and we began to refuse to listen to music that seemed to have uh some flaws, and that we the fewer the flaws, the

better in our opinion. Uh, in general, there's still people out there who prefer the more genuine music, if you want to call it that. I'm not going to get into that argument, because, uh, there are those people who love the super produced stuff, and they're the people who love the strip down stuff. And I don't think anyone is wrong. Um, and you know, it's all a matter of personal opinion at any rate, So editing that was the only way you could really get rid of a

flubbed note. But then a fellow by the name of Harold Hildebrand, better known as Andy to his buddies, came up with a special kind of software. It's this is believe it or not, the oil industry's contribution to music. That is not the joke. It really is. Mr Hildebrand, as it turns out, before he got into the world of making musicians sound better than they really do, was

a geophysicist. He created seismic data processing software, and this was a software that would sort of measure the the the seismic vibrations for oil companies to kind of get an idea of where the best oil deposits were, whether or not that were any oil deposits, that kind of thing,

because it's it's called auto correlation. Basically, once this sound goes into the ground, the reflections based on the material uh that is made up and you know, in the area that they're using the the sound give them an idea of what the composition of of the earth is underneath their feet essentially and can tell them where pockets of oil are stored, so it gives them a good idea of where to to drill. And he uh Andy Hildebrand made a lot of money, a whole lot of money,

retired at forty Yeah and clear. Really the next step for anyone who creates that kind of software is finding a way to get people to sing better. Well, the way I heard it, a friend challenged him, said, okay, fine, you're so smart, you're looking for something to do. Why didn't you fix it so I can sing better? And so he did. Yeah. So this is using a method called digital signal processing. And the idea here is that every sound that you hear is is really due to

vibrations everything. Yes, every sound is something vibrating against something else, and then eventually it becomes air molecules vibrating against one another, and then the vibrations hit your ear and uh, and your brain manages to uh to translate this into sound

what we perceive as sound. So uh, the the notes that we hear are vibrations at particular frequencies, and in general, the higher the frequency, actually not in general, the higher the frequency, the higher the sound, the pitch and the sound right, so um, let's see if I can find then the information I actually wrote down what the different divisions were. I think four hundred and forty vibrations per

second is an A note. That is correct, So that's your basic A. So you're basically is four vibrations per second. And I'm I'm sitting here with a musician, so I expect you to correct me whenever and I get things wrong. Well, I had a tuning fork, but I had forgotten we were doing this today, so I left her to have them. Oh that's a shame that would have been coming. Alright, So four and forty isn't a and then you can if you increase that the vibrations per second, you then

the notes go up. And uh so I actually, let's say four vibrations per second would be a B note. Five and eighty seven vibrations per second or thereabouts would be a C note, which is not Shaving and haircut, all right, So that's about these days. Never mind, I can't tell I was about to out one of our one of our coworkers who did recently spend more than a hundred dollars on a haircut. But I will not do that because this person will kill me anyway at

any rate. So, yes, the vibrations determine what the note is. And so let's say that you're trying to sing an a note. Now, if you're trying to sing an a note, what's happening is your vocal cords are vibrating to generate this and that's what's generating the sound. Right. So uh, most of us are not capable of holding an a note perfectly, um, for any extended time. I mean we're gonna are are It's going to wander a little bit. Yes, I I tend to Uh, I tend to sing a

little sharp, to be honest, Yeah, I tend. I tend to sing in a different key, but at any rate, so uh, or sometimes my wife prefers it if I sing in a different state. Um. But the so if you if you visual is each note with a line going to the right. So let's say you know you have a B C yeah, and you have the lines to the right, uh, and you think of the person singing, it tends to look kind of like a sign wave.

I mean, it usually tends to hover around the note, unless the person is a terrible singer, in which case it may not be anywhere close to the note they're supposed to be singing generally, if you can never mind. Yeah, I see, I see what you're see what I'm saying.

So let's say let's say I'm trying to sing an A, but I have terrible pitch and I'm tone deaf, and I'm actually singing what is closer to a B. Well, I would say, I would argue even that someone who is a really good singer is going to waiver in pitch somewhat because the vibration of your vocal chords depends a lot on how much air uh you're putting in, and if you are running out of breath, yeah, it tends to peter l your your attending. Yeah, the pitch

of your voice is going to change. So so, I mean, even even the best singers are going to have this problem. So what Hildebrand did was he decided to create some software that could nudge this these these variations around a note or sometimes you know, hitting the wrong note entirely and put them where they're supposed to be, so kind of smoothing out the peaks and valleys across the line so to to make it a more a more consistent note, or to even shift it up or down the scale

so that it hits the note it's supposed to be on. Now, you can only do this a little bit within within a couple of notes of where you're supposed to be without its sounding artificial, right, And there's there's a lot of other little factors in there, because the the auto tune software gives you some control over how quickly the pitch shifts up. But you can you can actually set the range, uh the key that you're supposed to be

singing in, so it can it can. It has some idea of what you're trying to do, so you can. You can have an auto detect, like if if you put on auto detect. Essentially, what the software does is it assumes whatever note you're singing closest to is the note you wanted to sing. Yes, So if you are at least a decent singer, the auto function of auto tune should get you pretty much where you wanted to be in the first place, even if you were, you know,

a little off. You can also do it manually, however, so let's say that that someone has hit just you know, just really misjudged it. They're singing the national anthem and when they get to uh uh the Land, you know, the Land of the Free, and they hit that high note, it's just way off. Well, then you might need to manually put it closer to the note it's supposed to be on. So it doesn't sound terrible, right, it doesn't work so well live, well it can not the manual. No, no, live,

it's auto. But now that that isn't that. One of the things that impressed me about the auto tune software is that it can be used live. It could be used in real time. Now granted that's when it's using the automatic feature, not the manual functure. As you were pointing out, you are correct. Otherwise you would have like the highest paid sound engineer on the planet, like rapidly switching the the pitch. So yeah, the software has this

very complex algorithm and it can it can. The cool thing is it can it can adjust the pitch without really affecting the tone of the voice. Now, this is a lot different from the old way of changing the pitch, which was just essentially playing it faster than you had before. Are you're thinking like those three rodents of recent movie fame, the Chipmunks. Yeah, alright, so we're going to give Liz

a little challenge here. We're going to we're going to speak in our normal tone of voice, but we're going to do so slowly so that Liz can speed it up later from or of voluble statter speaking there anyway, So by by speaking that up, Liz could could adjust the pitch of our voices. But of course that means that, you know, the whole tone sounds different and it's going much faster than before. The neat thing about auto tune

is it doesn't adjust the speed of the voice. It doesn't really affect the tone that much, unless again, you're trying to push it much further up or down the scale than where it originally started. Um, so it makes it sound more natural. Now, this method has been in use for years to just kind of tweak notes here and there. It wasn't really used as kind of an artistic thing until more recently. Yes, Actually, I I'll never forget the first time I heard Shares Believe and I thought,

could anyone make a more annoying song than that? It turns out yes, because I had not heard peanut butter jelly time at that point. Peanut butter, yes. But uh, but but in in the case with Share, she actually took a feature of the auto tune software that was never really intended to be used as as a performance thing and turned it into a performance And you remember when you were talking about how you adjust the speed

when the pitch changes, she essentially switched that to zero. Yes, there's a there's a range that the software has between zero and four hundred milliseconds, which is four tenths of a second. Especially and uh, you have the option that that's how long it takes for the pitch to shift to what it thinks it's supposed to be right, And and you may think, well, why would you want to

set that at four hundred? It makes it create a more natural sound, because we you know, we don't tend to sing notes perfect notes one right after the other, especially jumping around a lot, unless you're talking about like uh an Aria by Mozart and which case, I mean, those are amazing, but most of us can't sing those. Most of us, when we sing, we tend to slide a little bit from one note to the next. And if you take that that sliding out, it suddenly sounds

robotic and unnatural. But if your share and you're creating this song. Believe that turns out to be the effect you wanted to go for in the first place. So you turned this thing that would normally be considered a total a total mistake. You wouldn't want it to be in there because you wouldn't want people to detect that you had electronically altered your voice and turn it into a performance. And it ended up working out very well for her and got a lot of radio play and

slowly made me go crazy. Yeah, and of course then you had I wondered what did that now? Yeah, that was definitely a contributing factor. I can't lay all the blame and shares feet. No, but it's uh, but that explains why her voice sounds like it is snapping from pitch to pitch without any kind of any kind of glas Sando without any kind of you know, break glas Sando music theory coming in here, so you know. On on the other hand, there are artists who have essentially

made their living off of this. That would be you know Pain Yes, who not only made several songs featuring auto tune, but also the was the name behind the iPhone feature that allows people to download the the app The t paining app and and do live auto tuning of their own voices, and he's unapologetic about about using the software. Um, it's a performance, it's it's like any other tool. Now. Now, some people even argue that anyone using auto tune is cheating. Yeah, and that's that's what

some of the detractors say. But what he's doing with it is on purpose, So it's you know, he's like, no, no, this is my Yeah, I intended to do that. That was the whole purpose of it, which I think that's totally legitimate. I mean, it's just like taking a musical instrument and playing in a way different than than the way it was originally intended. That doesn't make it invalid. It just means that you're innovative. Right, So the same thing I just like share, I think was truly innovative

with that the way she she used auto tune. I may, I may hate the song, but I can't argue with the fact that it was innovative. I could have done without. The seven fifty or so songs that I've heard since then that are all using auto tune in that way is no longer innovative. It's just a different way of

performing and they think of it as cheating. Now, granted, lots of artists have been using this, a lot of producers have been using as It's very possible that some artists don't even know it was used on their their particular records. Um, they probably do, because suddenly they aren't having to do a lot of uh retakes and overdubs. They're doing, you know, one or two takes per song and heading for home. And that's down on the amount of studio time that you need to spend, and you

know that's expensive. And hilder Brand points out that auto tune does not make you a singer. Um. Auto tune can help correct pitch, it can help you be you can help you sing on pitch, and it will help help you sing the right notes. But if your vocal tone is not a good pleasing vocal tone, such as mine, what my my singing tone is pretty terrible. Um, even with auto tune, my singing is not gonna be great.

It's just gonna be the right notes, which granted, is an improvement, but it's not gonna be something you're gonna think, Hey, this is who I want to be listening to on that five hour flight that I got coming up. Can you can you auto tune karaoke? You could, you could do and yeah, why not? You could have a microphone built in with the auto tune and you could you could have it automatically auto tune your your your vocals.

That's got cheating, I mean considered cheating. Yeah, well I don't considering some of the people I've heard sing karaoke, I be willing to entertain some cheating. And I know the people who have heard me sing karaoke would entertain some eating. Um. And we were actually thinking at one point of having Liz auto tune some of some of us bits of bits of what we were doing here. Oh, you know, it's funny. We I'm surprised we haven't mentioned other phenomena that have used auto tune, not just in

the music industry, you mean, like auto tune the news. Yeah, there's this great YouTube series where these guys have taken news clips from you know, any like Usually it's about a week long period, but they take they take big news clips and then they put it through auto tune and turned them into songs and they cut the news clips up so that it makes it more Yeah, yeah, so that you get phrases and things, and sometimes they'll have someone repeat something five or six times to make

it more like a song. They are absolutely hysterical videos. There's also I've seen the auto tuning of the baby crying. The baby's crying, but they put it through auto tune. And here's the thing is that auto tune it is a software suite that you can purchase. But um but you can download a demo version and try it out for a while on your computer. It's only gonna last for a trial period, and then you are going to be prompted to purchase it. And then of course there's

the app on the iPhone that you can get. Um, so you can. That's that's considerably cheaper at yeah, yeah, so but you can. You can play around with this stuff and uh and and kind of see, you know, how how it is that the big names are able to get that really great produced sound on their tracks. I would never have expected this to come from a geologic technology. No. I I had real money on astrophysics, but not geophysics. Maybe quantum physics. Maybe you know that's

that's funny because technically it's called pitch quantization. Yeah, I I read through kind of now now, when when asked exactly what sort of things go into his uh calculations, Hildebrand said, and this is a direct quote out multiplications, additions, and a few divisions, but designed by an extensive theoretical foundation and digital signal processing, encompassing the physical principles of sound production, physics of hearing, disciplines of modeling, filtering, linear

systems theory, estimation theory, numerical analysis, calculus, music theory, and other disciplines pretty much including the pretty much, yeah, pretty much, it's right there, it's right there. Yeah. No, that was a direct quote that wasn't a frequently asked questions section. He he actually seems to be a sort of a

humorous kind of guy. He did, well, I mean you have to after after and he specifically stated that he had never intended anyone to use it in the way that t Pain and Share have used it and numerous other people at this point, however, it was always meant to be kind of a behind the scenes, you no way of just just tweaking a track, rather than an outright, uh, you know, the cat is out of the bag kind of thing. I do think. Uh. This this has led to the rise of music that is maybe just a

little bit too perfect for some people. So speaking of the people who are remember how we were saying some people really like low fi, some people really like hi fi. Right, I've had people say that song is just too perfect for me. Well, they could always listen to me sing and they'll be cured of that right away. Amen. Um, so, do you have anything else to add for our discussion on auto tuning? And not really? Um, it's just kind

of uh, it's kind of funny. It's pretty much baked into most studios at this point that that they have it there, but um, you know, it's it's pretty ubiquitous at this point, right. So, Um, here's where I'm gonna throw it out there, and Liz, I'm gonna apologize to you because you're gonna have to hear this unfiltered. In fact, if you want to play it unfiltered once and auto tuned once just to let people know how horribly I sing,

go for it, all right, guys. This song, by the way, has been in the public domain for about five years, so I don't want to hear anything from you. Guys. You know you should have warned me. I would you like to step out of the room. Um, alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously. Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously. There we go. That's all I'm gonna do. I don't want to hit you too hard. That's bad enough right there.

I could have done no never mind best copyright. So yeah, that was written, by the way, by Henry the Eighth, by the grace of God, King of England and France, Lord defender of the Faith and Lord of all Ireland. Um. Deceased, Yes for quite some time. So anyway, hopefully it's better than singing I'm Henry the Eighth. I am right. Hopefully Liz will be able to uh to auto tune that, and if not, hopefully she'll be able to cut that out. Alright, So that wraps this up on auto tune. I hope

that answers your question, Jane. Uh. And now that leads us to our second round of listener mail. Let's listen mail comes from Nathan, and Nathan says, Hi, guys, I was just wondering if you or anyone at your organization listens back to your podcast and can hear what sounds to me like an air conditioning hum in the background. Would it be possible to edit that out? Look forward to hearing back from you. Cheers Nathan, Nathan, that could be one of many things that could be a fan.

It might be the fan, and might it might even be the fan of my laptop, because you know, you know, I need that so that my computer does not overheat and shut down. And there's a refrigerator in the hallway. There's yeah, there is an air conditioning system. And here's the thing. We're dying in here. It is so hot in here. Please don't take our air conditioning away. And if I asked Liz to try and edit that out,

I think that would drive her crazy. So unfortunately, I think we're kind of stuck with what we have until but you know, we're we're renovating our our studio space. Who knows what's gonna sound like when we're done. You know, it only homes because it doesn't know the words. Very good, Chris, That is exactly right. So if you have any other questions, comments you'd like to criticize Chris for his joke, you can write us tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.

Check out our blogs blogs dot how Stuff works dot com. Check out the website itself, how stuff works dot com, because it's awesome. It is, it's so yeah, it's a great website, it's great resource. Um. Remember, we are no longer doing tech stuff live while we are renovating our

studio space. So that's gonna last for probably about six weeks, and then we're gonna think about what we can do with that video series when we get back, because we're gonna have a little bit more flexibility than we did before. So I feeling of you have any cool ideas of what you would like to see in a video series from tech stuff. Um, Like, for instance, you would say, I would love for the video series of tech stuff to have the stuff you should know guys in it.

Right a tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For moral thiss and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you