Re: [ARSCLIST] Speed correction

["Richard L. Hess" <ArcLists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One other thought on speed/pitch correction as applied to especially
quality music.

A little story first: A few years ago on "A Capitol Fourth" on PBS, a
well-known singer from the early 1970s was the first act. There was a
furor the next day on rec.audio.pro about the obvious addition of an
Antares-like (if not the Antares) pitch corrector in the vocal chain.
I no longer read rec.audio.pro but the arguments were something like
"This singer never needed pitch correction, it sounded wooden after
it was switched in..."

A few months later, I was having dinner with the person who mixed the
show and he said, "Yes the singer did require the pitch correction,
her producer was anxious for me to add it." I spoke with a singer
friend of mine who reminded me of her motto, "more me in the
monitors." We all agreed there probably wasn't enough of the singer
in the monitors, dictated in part by the staging. This show typically
is sparse on monitors.

So even singers who normally don't need pitch correction may need it
under difficult performance conditions.

My caution here is that pitch correction corrects intentional
"bending" of notes and makes the pitch exact. There is a "bending"
tool in Samp8's Elastic Audio, but I think if you don't apply that to
a given note and you use some of the auto pitch correction, each
note, for its duration, will end up right on pitch....exactly.

So, I'm still confused how to apply automatic pitch correction to
chamber music. At least with the current tools.

I think the Plangent Processes might be useful (I hear it's $100/min,
but that's third hand) for some of these situations.
http://www.plangentprocesses.com/ This does not lock into program
material, but rather looks for other information in recordings to
which it can apparently phase lock. In tapes, it can use bias, but it
can also use hum and other information.

Jamie credits a lot of people on his Web site, but the original
concept credit, I believe, at least for use of bias
recovery,  belongs to Dr. Michael Gerzon of Oxford.
http://www.ambisonic.net/gerzon.html

Richard L. Hess                           email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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