While many of us enjoy a good sing-song, we鈥檙e not all as talented as Susan Boyle or Stevie Wonder.
Now you don鈥檛 have to be, as a new autotune tool can tweak your karaoke vocal performances by using notes you鈥檝e already sung to help fill parts of the performance that are off-key.
Normally, autotune snaps all out-of-tune notes into the perfect pitch. While this eases the strain on the listener鈥檚 ears, it can sometimes sound robotic.
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To try to make a more natural autotune, at Indiana University Bloomington and colleagues, trained an artificial intelligence system to identify false notes and correct them by studying nearly 5,000 samples of people singing karaoke.
The samples came from Smule 鈥� a karaoke app that has nearly 50 million monthly users, where Wager was doing an internship.
Many of the samples were edited so that the occasional note here and there would be clearly out of tune. The tool was then trained to pick out such notes that didn鈥檛 fit the key of the song and correct them based on the other parts of the sample.
The idea was not to make everything absolutely perfect pitch, but rather shift notes as close as possible to the appropriate pitch, while retaining the singing style of the vocalist.
鈥淲hen looking at how to correct the current note, we look at what the singer did over the past few seconds,鈥� says Wager.
Examples of the de-tuned and re-tuned audio recordings .
, a music producer based in London, is impressed with the results. 鈥淭he quality is excellent,鈥� he says. However, he notes that not all singers like the idea of a computer editing their voice.
Wager says that the current tool must be applied to recordings after they have been made, such as on a singing app like Smule. However, she says she would be interested in developing a version that can edit amplified vocals live 鈥� such as in karaoke bars.
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