The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I was stumbling around this morning and came across this YouTube video:

It covers a product called Melodyne and their new version 2 update coming out this fall that does Polyphonic note separation for pitch and timing adjustment. Basically that’s a fancy way of saying you can take something like a quartet playing together in a recording (say from a CD) and the software can split out each note separately for individual editing and adjustment without losing sound quality.

This type of stuff is pretty amazing because you could take a recording of one song and completely change it into something else. It is also pretty scary because the idea that what you play is worth something seems somehow diminished by the fact that the wrong note or chord can just be corrected, adjusted to be minor or major automatically or timings moved around and changed. As a musician myself, I think this type of thing will allow mediocre artists to make recordings that sound like they’re musical geniuses since everything can be re-touched and improved on the computer later.

I know we’ve been doing audio mixing and editing and laying down tracks over and over to mix and get it right, but this is something new and different. You don’t even need to lay down multiple tracks when you can just take the first one and fix it until it is perfect! Still, I can’t fault the software engineers who made Melodyne, it is really an amazing piece of software.

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