Music Doctoring

NYTimes.com: Circuits Newsletter: "Like many recording engineers these days, Jan works primarily in Pro Tools, a program that records audio directly to the hard drive. On the screen, you see bands of horizontal sound waves that represent the chunks of audio, which you can slice, dice, copy or paste. In this way, you can record, say, five takes of the same vocal line; later, when the musicians have gone home, you can choose the best chunks -- even the best syllables or even consonants -- from each take, and merge them into a single ''best of'' take.

None of this was new to me; back when Pro Tools and I were both young, I spent a lot of time in programs like this.

What blew me away, though, was the plug-ins.

On this special wedding CD, our soloists' interpretation, performance and vocal quality were amazing, but here and there we found notes that were sung just a hair sharp or flat. I'd suggest a retake, but Steve and Jan would say, ''We'll fix it.''

Turns out you can now buy add-on modules for Pro Tools that take sonic tweaking to an astounding new level. One of them, a $400 bit of magic called Anteres Auto-Tune, lets you fix off-pitch notes. As you can see by the lower illustration here (www.antarestech.com/products/auto-tune4.html), each sung or played note is represented by a horizontal line. You can literally drag these bars higher or lower, correcting their pitches without otherwise changing a single aspect of the original performance. The processing is undetectable; it simply sounds like your singer or player hit the correct notes in perfect tune."

Will our kids appreciate Lata, Kishore or Rafi ever ? They probably would have music lessons which woiuld have the same text books we use for DSP speech processing. Basic human talents would slowly be more and more undervalued. What if a computer could paint better than Picasso ? Would there ever be motivation to become an artist. No one would even think about art as we do today. Painting/Sculpting would mean understanding the science behind how the brain perceives colors and shapes and then generating thr best image based on your neural map. Can you adapt to that change within your lifetime.