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We have talked about the music software Auto-Tune before and now there is an article on its brief history: How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music. Auto-Tune, for those not in the know, is music software developed for use in recording. I haven't used it myself, but what it does is take the feed from a microphone, typically recording a singer, and filter it so all the frequencies that pass are in tune, hence the name. It is kind of a Procrustean bed for pitch. It was developed to "fix" the notes when a singer sang out of tune. Here is the slightly more fervent description of how it came on the scene from the article:
And here is the song so you can hear for yourself:It happened exactly 36 seconds into the song—a glimpse of the shape of pop to come, a feel of the fabric of the future we now inhabit. The phrase “I can’t break through” turned crystalline, like the singer suddenly disappeared behind frosted glass. That sparkly special effect reappeared in the next verse, but this time a robotic warble wobbled, “So sa-a-a-ad that you’re leaving.”The song, of course, was Cher’s “Believe,” a worldwide smash on its October 1998 release. And what we were really “leaving” was the 20th century.
That "crystalline" effect is when a note not quite on pitch is shoehorned into being on pitch by the software. The first time you hear it, it sounds robotic--people just don't sing like that. Here is how the inventors thought about what they were doing:
The expressed goal of Antares at that time was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. “When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost,” the original patent asserted sweepingly—seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where “wrong” has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, as it were—to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion.If you know a bit more about music history you would realize that pushing the pitch one way or another for expressive purposes is as old as singing itself. I remember doing a song by John Dowland with an early music specialist where he flattened and sharped certain notes according to expressive needs suggested by the lyrics themselves: "My music, hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep."
The crucial shift with Auto-Tune came when artists started to use it as a real-time process, rather than as a fix-it-it-in-the-mix application after the event. Singing or rapping in the booth, listening to their own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones, they learned how to push the effect. Some engineers will record the vocal so that there is a “raw” version to be fixed up later, but—increasingly in rap—there is no uncooked original to work from. The true voice, the definitive performance, is Auto-Tuned right from the start.The article has a lot of information and mentions as an example of the more comprehensive uses of Auto-Tune a song by Kanye West that I have talked about before. In "Lost in the World" a whole chorus of voices is processed through Auto-Tune:
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In Commentary magazine Terry Teachout muses about the fate of opera in the US: The Fat Lady Is Singing.
Is American opera as a whole in a terminal condition? Or are the collapse of the New York City Opera and the Met’s ongoing struggle to survive purely local matters of no relevance elsewhere? Heidi Waleson addresses these questions in Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America.2 Waleson draws on her experience as the opera critic of the Wall Street Journal to speculate on the prospects for an art form that has never quite managed to set down firm roots in American culture.The financial challenges for opera production are formidable:
The Met had particular difficulty managing the reduced circumstances of the 21st century when it came to opera. Its 3,800-seat theater has an 80-foot-deep stage with a proscenium opening that measures 54 feet on each side. (Bayreuth, by contrast, seats 1,925, La Scala 2,030, and the Vienna State Opera 2,200.) As a result, it is all but impossible to mount low-to-medium-budget shows in the Metropolitan Opera House, even as the company finds it is no longer able to fill its increasingly empty house. Two decades ago, the Met earned 90 percent of its potential box-office revenue. That figure plummeted to 66 percent by 2015, forcing Gelb to raise ticket prices to an average of $158.50 per head. On Broadway, the average price of a ticket that season was $103.86.Teachout concludes that, in the absence of European-style state subsidies, opera may not be able to survive in America.
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The question of the moral worth, or even moral status of music, is one that is often critiqued by the hipper musicologists and Alex Ross. Has classical music been permanently compromised by the fact that the Nazis were fond of it? He seems to think so. But the sense that perhaps the sublime beauty and transcendence of the music of someone like Bach does have a positive moral effect still prevails in some quarters. The New York Times reports that Yo-Yo Ma Wants Bach to Save the World.
The cycle mentioned is the set of six suites for solo cello by J. S. Bach, almost unknown to audiences until the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals recorded them in the 1930s. My thinking on this is that the process of learning to play music, particularly classical music, because of the focus, concentration and discipline required, is a very valuable pastime, leading to the development of moral character. Hopefully some of this is transferred to the listener in performance, but I am less sure of that!His trip to Leipzig was part of a sprawling project related to the album: Over the next two years, he will visit 36 cities — winking at the fact that each of the six suites has six sections — on six continents. (His next stop is Washington, on Nov. 29.)In each city, he will pair a performance of the full cycle — nearly two and a half hours of labyrinthine music, played with barely a pause — with what he’s calling a “day of action” that brings Bach into the community, as in his trip to Neustadt. It’s a small and glancing, but also deeply felt, attempt to suggest that this music, with its objectivity and empathy, its breathless energy and delicate grace, could, if heard closely by enough people, change the world.
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And for our silly segment: Classical Pianist Glenn Gould Is the Next Artist Prepping for Posthumous Hologram Tour.
What the article fails to mention is that Gould gave up all public performances quite early in his career. How ever did they manage to talk his estate into allowing this?!?!?! Here is an interview in which he states why: "I detest audiences!"Eyellusion, the hologram entertainment company behind tours for Frank Zappa and Ronnie James Dio, is working with Gould's rights holder Primary Wave Music Publishing on a Glenn Gould Hologram Tour with dates expected to be announced in late 2019."Glenn Gould would have loved this new technology that will bring his very best performances to venues across Canada and around the world," said Faye Perkins in a statement on behalf of the Glenn Gould estate. "Glenn's live performances were always an event and we are thrilled for fans old and new to be able to experience what it was like to see him on stage."
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I think that this calls for an envoi of Glenn Gould playing in his natural environment, the recording studio. Here he is in a performance from a television studio with a Beethoven sonata. He gives an introduction, the piece begins at the 5:37 mark:
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