Holy shit
Ok thatsplenty, forgive me some audio nerdness, but this is pretty big news in the music technology world. Melodyne has done something that I, and most everyone else considered impossible: individual editing of voices/notes/instruments from an audio file. This is a huge leap in technology, one that I assumed was decades away, which will have vast repercussions in the world of music. The only reason I'm posting about it here is that while playing guitar hero with many of you the discussion has come up: "I wish we could import any song we wanted..." or something like that, and I would say "Thats impossible, a computer can't hear individual instruments". Well, sike. I am now officially wrong. This is as close to magic as I've seen. Thank you, Herr Germans.
That was amazing. I just watched the first third of the tech demo, to the point where he seperates all the notes out from a single chord for manipulation.
And I was like "Holy shit."
That's what I said.
What sort of opportunities do you see for this in the future, sam?
The biggest repercussion I see will be in remixes and mashups: IE girl talk. This essentially liberates the remixer and DJ from the last constraint of recontextualizing songs. Someone theoretically could make any song fit -- tempo-wise and now harmonically -- with any other song. Karaoke no longer needs to have cheesy MIDI versions, they can just lift the vocal. Guitar Hero is the same principal. In terms of recording, the sonically-minded could do some serious wizardry. This is the music tech equivalent of functional nanotechnology. Expect to hear some crazy ass music.
Ooooooh cooooooooooool!!
I mean, I know what this would mean in terms of my own work - it will make it very easy to remove dialog from movie soundtracks, so that we can redub movies more easily and for maximum excitement!!!!!!
But I wasn't sure about the, you know, music applications.
I'm looking forward to pirate copies of this everywhere, and all the crazy fucked up music we will get!
I mean, it looks easy enough for a child to use... So even little kids can get in on the fun.
Ha, yeah, I totally remember that conversation at steve's house. go us (i.e. the germans).
My biggest curiosity is if it deals with things like Just intonation or eastern tunings, and how its going to work with processed sound. Heavily distorted electric guitar, densely 'verbed choruses, etc. Everything he pulled apart was really clean.
Similarly, it might lose it's lunch over certain aggregate sound files... I'd be curious to see how it handles piano and voice duo. Or a small chamber orchestra. The Chet Baker piece makes me hopeful, though he does say "if you're lucky..." When he says you can try it on complete mixes, I get a sense of danger.