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Miraculous Direct Note Access can completely change music

dvice.com — Music recording software just took another giant leap, now able to do what was thought to be impossible.

Who dugg this? Made popular Apr 17, 2008

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  • 68024, on 04/17/2008, -12/+101Music, now with 20% less talent!
  • razorsharp84, on 04/17/2008, -3/+81That was a very-well-produced video; explained things perfectly.
  • ginestony, on 04/17/2008, -6/+72So Hanna Montana doesn't actually sing good??? oh noes!
  • aelias, on 04/17/2008, -3/+59Soooooo false. To be fair, it is a common misconception. As an audio engineer who gets paid, I feel qualified to tell you: Garbage in, Garbage out.
    This is the golden rule. So much so that if you can't get it done while you're on the clock, someone better than you will be brought in to play your part correctly.
  • doctechnical, on 04/17/2008, -22/+73Technology renders talent obsolete. Why learn how to sing or play an instrument, just wail away and we'll fix it in the mix.
  • amneosis, on 04/17/2008, -0/+50He says midi funny.
  • inactive, on 04/17/2008, -1/+47"What doesn't work in theory can still work in reality."
    Huh... WHAT?!
    My mind has officially been blown.
  • GothAlice, on 04/17/2008, -2/+48Just because the technology makes it easy, doesn't mean you're going to be any good. Plus, file sharing will only get you so far… and even then, only if you're Trent.
  • jbenson2, on 04/17/2008, -5/+51Musical Photoshop - what a great concept.
  • pegothejerk, on 04/17/2008, -6/+50technology still can't reproduce the ability to decide to place a subtle oboe halfway through your sonata in order to provoke an emotional response in the saddened gut. It can't write a masterpiece in rock, as that takes good timber on all the instruments outside of the notes and composition. It can't give you a billie holiday or tom waits growl in the voice that sounds like the devil himself sold it to you. It can't create dissonance like wagner.

    technology is useful, it's not a replacement for human instinct, prowess, and creativity.
  • destro713, on 04/17/2008, -3/+41The sound engineer in me says, "neat."

    The music appreciator in me runs for his life.
  • colinbg, on 04/17/2008, -1/+38Back Streets Back... Alright!
  • Capta1nA, on 04/17/2008, -5/+37Technology also provides more tools to express yourself. The possibilities with this are endless, not just fixing a sloppy performance.
  • RedRummy, on 04/17/2008, -8/+40Ahh, the Holy Grail of music production. Its an excellent step forward, but it only currently works on very simple, easy to split, sound sources... I wonder if it will be truly possible to split a full song.
  • stonebone4, on 04/17/2008, -8/+35Sweet, now it'll be even easier for talentless hacks like Paris Hilton to make "music." Hooray science!
  • doctechnical, on 04/17/2008, -5/+30I agree with you, but I don't know how long you've been an engineer - tell me, how much garbage is coming in now versus a decade or three ago?
    Ok, I'm an old fart. I listen to the massively over-produced made for MP3 compression crap today and my ears cringe.
    Well, they would if they could.
    And get off my lawn! :)
  • TomK88, on 04/17/2008, -11/+35That's awesome. I love how music creation is becoming more and more accessible. For a couple thousand dollars you can create a studio which can create music that rivals anything out there right now. Plus with the popularity of file sharing and the internet it's easier than ever to distribute your work and be heard.
  • Ciryon, on 04/17/2008, -23/+46Some will say this is bad because now everyone can make music without beeing able to play an instrument, to those people: ***** you. I don't care how the music is made as long as it sounds good. Hell, this make more people understand how music is made. I will still be able to appreciate "real" artists, talent comes in different forms you know.
  • trapilales, on 04/18/2008, -0/+21The goal is to make beautiful music. The means of how you get there are irrelevant. I couldn't care less if a beautiful piece of music was made by a musical prodigy or a talentless chump in his basement. All that matters is the end product.

    Technology is great because it's expanding the pool of people that can experiment. But just because it's easier to make doesn't mean it's automatically good. Those are two different things, and in the end crap will be crap no matter who or what made it.
  • shark72, on 04/18/2008, -0/+17Well, the fellow's German. There's a German word for stuff that works in reality but not theory: Arbeitenwirklichkeitnichttheorie. Remarkably compact language, that German is.
  • ChiffX, on 04/17/2008, -3/+19The creator scares the ***** out of me.
  • Onyxblaze, on 04/17/2008, -3/+18well
  • Cymrubeats, on 04/17/2008, -2/+17The people who criticise tools like this, obviously don't have the first idea about what music production entails.
    OK, it'll mean in the pop world that image can take even more of a forward position, over 'talent', but it has always been that way, for the past few decades at least, and it's the consumers who are at fault, no one else. Anyway, garbage in, garbage out, as has already been said...the people who are already creative, will take a tool like this and blow your f*cking mind apart, and i am so looking forward to it!
  • manitoba98xp, on 04/18/2008, -0/+14Google returns 0 results for that. Did you just concatenate the German words for working (arbeiten), reality (Wirklichkeit), not (nicht) and theory (Theorie)?
  • daniel2e, on 04/18/2008, -2/+13I don't see how it could be declared "truly impossible". After all, the human brain can do it. Wasn't it mozart who purportedly transcripted an entire polyphonic piece from memory on one hearing?

    This is not at all to take away from the achievement. If accurately portrayed in this film, it's very impressive indeed.
  • trogdor282, on 04/18/2008, -0/+11It's one thing to decide what notes are being played. It's another thing to remove a note and put it back in at a different pitch without destroying all the other notes. The whole reason that consonant chords are so pleasant to the ear is that the higher harmonics overlap.
  • DrummerAndrew, on 04/18/2008, -0/+11An appropriate comment in any situation, I'm sure.
  • inactive, on 04/17/2008, -4/+15When I am in LA doing sessions it is really amazing how much engineers rely on Antares Auto tune. They don't use the auto function though. they switch it to expert mode which then you can tell it what key you are in and then it will analyzing the selected melody and place it on a grid map. You can then use a pencil tool and manually draw in the pitch, adding vibrato, keeping it slightly flat, or slightly sharp, and adding all sorts of "natural" vocal techniques that singer totally ***** up.

    Everything you here on the radio has been Antares Auto Tuned in expert mode.

    I for one am against this new development mentioned in this article. It will put me out of work because there will be no need for a session musician who has mastered his craft to be paid top dollar for a session when some audiophile with this new plug in can just change everything.
  • consonance, on 04/17/2008, -1/+12I dare you to to use Direct Note Access to create a song after it's released by Celemony. It will be readily available through BitTorrent. Chances are 9 out of 10 that you will write a sucky song. Why? If you don't understand songwriting, you can't write a song. DNA is a tool and an enabler. It is not a substitute for songwriting. Not everybody can write a good song.
  • inactive, on 04/18/2008, -0/+11Dude, this new version of melodyne hasn't even come out yet; what the ---- are you talking about. I've been waiting for this new version forever for my productions.
  • asdfrewq, on 04/18/2008, -4/+15Oh please. The over-blown, expensive studio is just another example of the blatant excess of the recording industry.

    You're right, a budget home studio won't compare with a multi-million dollar setup, but a $60,000 studio in the right hands certainly will. Spending more will give you options, but spending 6 mil? Or even 1 mil? That's ridiculous.
  • gregm11, on 04/17/2008, -2/+12Talent is in the CREATION of music. Technology can't replace human creativity.
  • consonance, on 04/17/2008, -1/+11You fail to consider the possibilites of this software. If you haven't noticed, the sample is becoming something akin to a musical instrument. A tool like this would be ideal for making a single audio file a workable virtual instrument in both a professional studio and a home studio.
  • FasmTrout, on 04/17/2008, -0/+10"Hey this demo tape is pretty good. Care to play it live?"
    "Wow, gee look at the time. I must get going!"
    "But... I..."
  • exomni, on 04/17/2008, -6/+16Musicians are already just banging out crappy takes with the knowledge that the producers can "fix it all" for them. This just makes it worse, honestly.
  • Starch, on 04/17/2008, -0/+10For years, we were told it was truly impossible, the old 'putting the toothpaste back in the tube' analogy applied well here. BUT sometimes these company demos don't live up to the hype; I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
  • bonjovisucks, on 04/18/2008, -0/+10I thought so, too. Are you more of a "mid-ee" person or "my-die"? Personally, I'm the former.
  • jtxx000, on 04/18/2008, -0/+10What he's saying is that the ideal solution (an algorithm that splits any given audio source into monophonic parts) is impossible to create, but an approximate solution *is* possible.

    Think about distorted guitar chords. Since distortion on chords creates many new strange and wonderful harmonics, to successfully deconstruct this type of sound, you would effectively need to undo the distortion, correct the pitch/timing, and then redo the distortion again. There are simply too many types of audio sources to be able to successfully separate all of them. However, they have apparently developed an algorithm that works fairly well for common sources, so their approximate solution is good enough for real-life situations.
  • daniel2e, on 04/18/2008, -0/+10Not only that, but what is it that you care about? Skill of performance, or skill of composition? The former is predominately mechanical, the latter creative. So yea, I'm all for "faking" mechanical talent if it better reveals the talent of the music itself.
  • TheCoreh, on 04/18/2008, -0/+9[citation needed]
  • oxygen911, on 04/18/2008, -0/+9I am one of those engineers. I've tuned many a vocal that has been on top 40 radio that you would probably think was never touched by auto-tune.

    It's not "expert mode" by the way, it is "graphical mode". The "auto-mode" is the one giving you the "cher effect" when it is turned on stun, also you can hear it in many contemporary hip hop and rnb songs being used as an effect. Literally almost every vocal you hear on the radio has been tuned. Back in the day before auto-tune, engineers would take a vocal, word for word, and put it into a sampler to pitch shift it, then bounce it back to tape.
    You can't make someone sound good vocally (that would require changing the formants, although that technology is on it's way as well), but you can put them in key without the listener even being able to hear the tuning going on.

    Listening to songs on the radio and thinking you're just listening to a band in a room is like watching a movie and thinking they just put one camera up and filmed everything that was going on. It's just the way it is.

    One thing about any pitch correction software is that it works well with clean sources, try tuning a guy with a raspy voice or a distorted guitar and auto-tune/melodyne won't be able to track the pitch because of the 2nd and 3rd harmonic distortion. Thats why they didn't highlight it in the video I presume. Still, a very cool step forward in this production tool.
  • nowisnothing, on 04/18/2008, -0/+9Played with what? Direct note access will only be available in Melodyne 2, and that won't be hitting the shelves until fall...
  • GliTCH82, on 04/18/2008, -1/+10Why's it "cheating" if the end result is a great work of art? I see nothing wrong with this, it gives more people the ability to make quailty music that expresses what they like to hear.
  • jaihu, on 04/17/2008, -2/+10While I am the first one to say that *****, TALENT IS UNNECESSARY... i think the video (although edited straight out of the LIFE EXTENSION ad from "Vanilla Sky") is showing very mundane uses for it. Sure "correcting" a guitar is killing the need for talent. But technology like this will breed a new form of talent where amazing artists will be able to use this technology to create ***** you can't even fathom... sounds that wont have any pertinence to reality, but instead take advantage of the technology to take music in a whole new direction. Still, the idiots will kill music's soul by fixing all their mistakes... but somewhere, someone will be making something CRAZY awesome with it. (i.e. auto-tune = britneyspears, but similar technology is involved in vocoding which = daft punk)
  • GothAlice, on 04/17/2008, -0/+8Working the music being worked on into the video was impressively done. I especially liked where they pitch-bended as the play head was passing over a segment. XD Too easy!
  • CrimsonFlash, on 04/17/2008, -1/+8This is the girl that did the music for the video. Nina Deli.
    http://www.myspace.com/ninadeli
  • robbiemuffin, on 04/18/2008, -1/+8it says it can select and change notes from a single instrument in a ful symphony. I think they're addressing the very limit you're saying they still need to address.
  • BrendanSheehan, on 04/17/2008, -3/+10One thing this will lead to is over produced albums. Sometimes not being perfect is better. The Eagles is the perfect example of this. Of the best bands in the world managed to ***** up their most recent album by producing the crap out of it, and killing any edge it would have had.
  • raindogmx, on 04/18/2008, -0/+7If we had not applied technology to music we would have never had drums, guitars, pianos, trumpets, recording equipment, etc.
    What would have been of Mozart without technology? what about bands like Radiohead?
    As I see it this is just a new instrument (for creating music). The outcome will always depend on the artist.
  • epithius, on 04/17/2008, -0/+6Let's see what it can do with a Slayer song; THEN I'll be impressed
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