luka

Well-known member
There's also the 'vocal science' thing in UKG - a chap called Bat coined that in the late 90s on uk-dance forum to describe the way producers were chopping up, mashing and stretching vocals in a similar way to how jungle producers were doing this earlier to beats (though to be fair, Neon Screams does cite Todney Edwards)
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
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There's also the 'vocal science' thing in UKG - a chap called Bat coined that in the late 90s on uk-dance forum to describe the way producers were chopping up, mashing and stretching vocals in a similar way to how jungle producers were doing this earlier to beats (though to be fair, Neon Screams does cite Todney Edwards)
He does deal with this in the book though, the difference being that sampling voices "parted performance and performer" whereas autotune folds our humanity into the process. Reynolds says something similar in the intro that with autotune, "the electric otherworld comes from within - it's the voice, our most intimately personal and bodily posession"

They're good points I think.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
And I agree with him when he says Autotune isn't really homogenising too. In dancehall, Tommy Lee Sparta, Alkaline, the 6ix Collective (Squash, Chronic Law, Daddy1, Rebel Sixx) all use autotune and pitchshifting/harmony engines in different ways and they all sound different from each other because they have distinctive voices.

Sure, you do get a load of second and third division artists that do all sound more or less the same, but this would happen without autotune anyway.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
And I agree with him when he says Autotune isn't really homogenising too. In dancehall, Tommy Lee Sparta, Alkaline, the 6ix Collective (Squash, Chronic Law, Daddy1, Rebel Sixx) all use autotune and pitchshifting/harmony engines in different ways and they all sound different from each other because they have distinctive voices.

Sure, you do get a load of second and third division artists that do all sound more or less the same, but this would happen without autotune anyway.
yeah i really liked that point, that vocal psychedelia has the potential to enhance individuality. rather than simply bringing their own unique voice to a track, each vocalist can bring their own set of production tricks as well. on the book’s terms, you could say that each vocalist can become a god with their own distinct magic aura or something.

you can kind of hear this in the stuff blissblogger’s son has written about: a bunch of artists will appear on the same track whose vocals are all processed in blatantly different ways.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
And I agree with him when he says Autotune isn't really homogenising too. In dancehall, Tommy Lee Sparta, Alkaline, the 6ix Collective (Squash, Chronic Law, Daddy1, Rebel Sixx) all use autotune and pitchshifting/harmony engines in different ways and they all sound different from each other because they have distinctive voices.

Sure, you do get a load of second and third division artists that do all sound more or less the same, but this would happen without autotune anyway.

No the effect itself is musically homogenous. That doesn't mean it can't be used in ever more bewildering and confounding ways, but it requires baroque notions of artistry. Samplers are totally orthogonal because they involve spending (ejaculation) rather than retention and balancing the books (to use a crude psychoanalytic analogy.)

Appreciate this is a bit of a pointless theoretical quibble but I just wanted to clarify what I meant by autotune being a homogenous effect. It's closer to the Eventide h910 harmonizer than akai samplers in its execution.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
and anyway, standardisation is not a bad thing. Part of what makes King Tubby still so startling is precisely because he was subverting standardisation itself. If everything is original, a la 20th century high modernist serial composers, then eventually nothing becomes original.

Technos very homogenisation (as one of the most homogenised genres in the entire world) makes it so great, because you can always cheekily bend the rules.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i dont think so. it wasnt intended to be.

i mean i don't care but you're essenttially arguing that your interpretation on an aesthetic plane is that Kit's music is ADHD music.

Which I don't know, seems pretty dismissive to me.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i mean its a valid perspective but with that 410 track I wanted to know what you thought of it because I can imagine how Kit hates it, given his hatred of Gun Lean.

But inasmuch as we approach Young Thug in the UK, stateside heads have every right to big up Russ and Headie One on those very same aesthetic grounds that Kit sets up.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like, yes, I would agree with him that the tune is a bit of a joke, but someone without that context might view it differently.

It's not *that bad* is it? i mean it is, but it's also not. Kitsch is fashionable in the era of internet 2.0.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
The hilarious thing is kitsch mackintosh is the best review that anyone could write about this book. I can't imagine a music writer who has shamelessly revelled in the kitsch like this. It would be even funnier if he started dualing with the nts curator aristocracy.

Like Alkaline's lyrical repertoire is ha ha I can ejaculate in a girls mouth and build a career off this.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
No the effect itself is musically homogenous. That doesn't mean it can't be used in ever more bewildering and confounding ways, but it requires baroque notions of artistry. Samplers are totally orthogonal because they involve spending (ejaculation) rather than retention and balancing the books (to use a crude psychoanalytic analogy)
I don't understand this, orthogonal to what?
 

luka

Well-known member
i mean i don't care but you're essenttially arguing that your interpretation on an aesthetic plane is that Kit's music is ADHD music.

Which I don't know, seems pretty dismissive to me.
oh, i see, you've just misunderstood my meaning. what i was saying is that the way we on dissensus interact with music is
to listen to a tune someone has posted on youtube over our laptop/ smartphone speakers for 12 seconds, skipping forward a few times in
the process to see if anything interesting happens. and that this is perhaps not the ideal mode of interacting with music
and arguably doesnt present it in its most compelling form.
 
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daddek

Well-known member
In 1998 Cher’s auto tune mangled croning dominated radio & tv. that impossible stepped pitched vocal sound forced itself into everyones conscious .
in the video she appears as some kind post human rave ai goddess. more spirit creature than the 1980s robo/computer association of the vocoder voice. afaik the digitally warped voice had been absenr from pop for over a decade, but with this tune it was been reborn with new tech and new symbolism. there was a bunch of handbag house auto clones in it’s wake, then nothing. Probably the world needed time to disassociate it with cher before exploring it further.

The tech now is basically the same as this cher thing, so idk about the books state of the art claim. it’s an aesthetic shift not technical one.
I fucking hate this song.

 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The tech now is basically the same as this cher thing, so idk about the books state of the art claim. it’s an aesthetic shift not technical one.
I fucking hate this song.
It's both - this article explains well some of the developments both with the software and how it is used post-Cher.
 
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