The video right below blew me away. I’ve been using Celemony’s Melodyne (first version) for some time and was already impressed by the possibilities it offers. Melodyne is a multitrack audio production suite in which you record tracks assigned from your audio sequencer. Once recorded you can easily play around with tone, pitch, amplitude and griding of the different individual notes. I mostly used it to harmonize backing vocals, auto-tune my dreadful singing and create funky baritone and soprano leads. Now they got this going way further. With the new version, Direct Note Access, Melodyne perfectly analyzes chords and separates them into single notes! Its like altering audio like you would MIDI. This huge step for audio production is just mind boggling. The way software is now capable of analyzing and altering audio waves really gets me thinking about how how much time it will take artificial intelligence to surpass humans on an artistic level. Of course we’ll deny their supremacy for a couple of decades, until…well, we will end up becoming their roadies.
I think like anything, these new-found powers may be used for good or evil. More than likely, this type of technology will be used by major labels to further homogenize the music, but there will also be fringe experimental artists like myself who will push even these tools to their farthest boundaries in order to create new, exciting music.
Take a bit to check out my album Clockwork Angels at http://echoroot.fuzz.com/album/Clockwork-Angels . The majority of the compositional heavy-lifting on this album was done by my homemade algorithmic composer, while the guitar parts were all improvised. My end goal is to take it to a level that new songs can be composed in real time on stage for improvised performances that are completely unique at every show. Being a true solo artist, this could generally only be done with backing tracks or midi. But with the type of technology you describe, it won’t be long before a computer program like mine could analyze and choose pre-recorded loops or even transpose them in real time to match the current composition.
Thanks for the heads up on Melodyne… I’ll definitely check it out!
[...] Melodyne’s Direct note access – the program that perfectly analyzes chords and separates them into single notes? We covered that [...]
[...] 11, 2009 by gigdoggy Last year, we wrote a post on Melodyne’s Direct Note Access – an audio program that perfectly analyzes chords and separates them into single notes – much like [...]