This is one of the stranger official product demos we’ve seen in a while. And strange is good.

First, the beautiful tattooed underground superlegend Kendra demos the Electro-Harmonix V256 Vocoder by doing her best T-Pain.

After a little technical background and some gender-bending discussion, Rick sings the Electro-Harmonix V256 Vocoder song.

Later, Rick demos the Metal Muff.

Want proof that the world is going to end in 2012?

If that video isn’t enough, consider this: Auto-Tune has been named one of America’s Hottest Brands by AdAge.

Here are their reasons why:

Auto-Tune was, for a long time, a product that barely spoke its own name. Popular singers wanted fans to think they were getting the real deal, making Auto-Tune practically a secret. So Antares Audio Technology, the company behind it, just established and held brand position among the few people who cared — music-production professionals and hobbyists — with regular advertising in trade publications and online ads.”We were not the only pitch-correction software out there,” said Marco Alpert, VP-marketing at Antares. “We worked for 10 years to establish the Auto-Tune brand as synonymous with pitch correction. There had been a concerted effort to establish a brand position. So when the whole idea of this effect came out into the popular music world, immediately we’re who people come to.”

The result is record revenue for Antares this year, according to Mr. Alpert, and a lot of profit, too. “We’re having our best year in history,” he said.

So you can see and hear more of T-Pain and Auto-Tune until 2012.

Symphony of Science – We Are All Connected (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

We Are All Connected was made from sampling Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The History Channel’s Universe series, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos and the Powers of 10.

MP3 available at http://www.symphonyofscience.com.

via melodysheep:

Lyrics:

[deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

[Feynman]
I think nature’s imagination
Is so much greater than man’s
She’s never going to let us relax

[Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature

[Nye]
I’m this guy standing on a planet
Really I’m just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There’s billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks

[Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

[deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)

[Feynman]
There’s this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other

And it’s all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it’s all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature

Carl Sagan – A Glorious Dawn ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

This video remixes footage from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series.

via melodysheep:

A musical tribute to two great men of science. Carl Sagan and his cosmologist companion Stephen Hawking present: A Glorious Dawn – Cosmos remixed. Almost all samples and footage taken from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s Universe series.

RIP Dr. Sagan, you will be missed!!

Please, click HQ to watch in better quality.

Go here to download the track:
http://www.colorpulsemusic.com/youtub…

And my website for more original music:
http://www.colorpulsemusic.com/

Enjoy!!

-John
boswelj3@gmail.com

Lyrics:

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it’s own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan}
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

Antares’ Auto-Tune is hated by many, but it’s, arguably, the most influential audio effect of our time.

With D.O.A., Jay-Z writes the obituary for Auto-Tune, saying “you rappers singing too much, get back to rap, you T-Paining too much.”

When Jay-Z’s rapping about an audio effect plug-in, you know it’s gone mainstream.

D.O.A. is free of the usual trappings of modern hip-hop – drum machine beats, samples and Auto-Tuned vocals – and it sounds pretty fresh, as a result.

What do you think? Is Auto-Tune D.O.A?

Jay-Z Death of Auto-tune Lyrics

“Only rapper to rewrite history without a pen,
No ID on the track let the story begin, begin, begin”

This is anti autotune, death of the ringtone, this ain’t for itunes, this ain’t for sing alongs,
this is Sinatra at the opera, bring a blonde, preferably with a fat ass who can sing a song, wrong,
this aint politcally correct, this might offend my political connects,
my raps don’t have melodies, this should make jackers wanna go and commit felonies, ahh
get your chain tooken, I may do it myself – I’m so Brooklyn.
I know we facing a recession, but the music y’all making going make it the great depression.
All y’all lack aggression put your skirt back down, grow a set man.
Yeah this just violent, this is the death of autotune, moment of silence.

This ain’t a number one record, this is practically assault with a deadly weapon,
I made it just for flex and Mister CEE I want people to feel threatened
stop your bloodclot crying, the kid, the dog everybody dying, no lying,
you boys jeans too tight, you colors too bright, your voice too light
I might wear black for a year straight, I might bring back Versace shades
this ain’t for z100, Ye told me to kill y’all to keep it 1 hundred,
this is for hot 97, for Khalid we the best’n,
yeah this is just violent, this is death of autotune, moment of silence.

This might need a verse from Jeezy, I might send this to the mixtape weezy,
get somebody from BMF to talk on this, give this to a blood let a crip walk on it,
50 thou to style on this, I just don’t need nobody to smile on this,
you rappers singing too much, get back to rap you t-paining too much.
I’m a multi-millionaire so how is it I’m still the hardest here,
I don’t be in the project hallway talking about how I be in the project all day
that sound stupid to me, if you a gangsta this is how you prove it to me.
Yeah just get violent, this is death of auto-tune moment of silence.

Synthtopia regular and fellow blogger Torley demonstrates how AutoTune EFX works, delivering a few jolts of audio pain and fun along the way.

via Torley

Frieze Magazine has published a article that takes a contrarian look at the musicality of Auto-Tune.

Author Jace Clayton first recognizes the fact that many musicians hate AutoTuned vocals:

Vocal purists hate Auto-Tune. They hear in its robotic modulations some combination of sugar-rush novelty, bulldozed nuance, jejune synthetics, loss of ‘soul’, disdain for innate vocal talent, teen-optimized histrionics, emotional anemia, and/or widespread musical decline. It’s ugly.

Discussing US R&B singer T-Pain’s Auto-Tune-aided hits in 2007, music critic Jody Rosen declared that, ‘T-Pain represents a kind of symbolic severing of African-American music from its traditional emotionalism […] the impassioned melismas that have powered black popular singing for decades are smoothed into synthetic gasps.’

Clayton goes on, though, to suggest that Auto-Tune is leading to a Man-Machine hybrid vocal style:

In an era of powerful computers that allow one to audition all manner of effects on vocals after the recording session, recording direct with Auto-Tune means full commitment. There is no longer an original ‘naked’ version. This is a cyborg embrace. In Cyborg Manifesto (1991), Donna Haraway notes that ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.’ Auto-Tune’s creative deployment is fully compatible with her ‘argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.’

What do you think? Are there artists that you think are using Auto-Tune to create cyborg art?

Auto-Tune the News #1: march madness. economic woes. pentagon budget cuts.

Interviewers, sportscasters, and vice presidents alike break into song to report important news. The players include:

• Newt Gingrich (on nuclear disarmament)
• Robert Gates (on cutting the Pentagon budget)
• Jim Nantz (on March Madness)
• Joe Biden (on the economic situation)
• Wayne Ellington (on how it feels to win)

Not sure what’s worse – this or the way it’s used in most pop songs……

via schmoyoho:

Interviewers, sportscasters, and vice presidents alike break into song to report important news. The players include

my homey Sarah Fullen Gregory (she married my brother). You can find her music here:
http://sarahfullen.com/
http://www.myspace.com/sefullen
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sarah-F…

Newt Gingrich (on nuclear disarmament)
Robert Gates (on cutting the Pentagon budget)
Jim Nantz (on March Madness)
Joe Biden (on the economic situation)
Wayne Ellington (on how it feels to win)

Lyrics:

MG: Mr. Gingrich, what do you think about Obama wanting to cut down on nuclear weapons? In the key of C. And…go!

NG: Uh, I just think that it’s very dangerous to have a fantasy foreign policy
And it can get you in enormous trouble

MG: What’s wrong with fantasy?
I like fantasy and I live in the sea

RG: We must rebalance this department’s programs
In order to institutionalize and finance our capabilities

SG: Yeah, forget about the jets;
Use our super soakers, get al quaeda wet

JN: Tar Heels: rolling on to number 1
Another convincing Carolina victory

SG: Ooh, that’s cool, but it ain’t time to pop the hennessy

JN: Michigan State: heading to the national championship game
Your team responded late here, coach, how did you do it?

MG: Three words: Vi ag ra.

JB: There will continue to be job losses
The remainder of this year
The question is will they continually go down
Before they begin to rebound
Before they begin to rebound
Will they go do-do-do-down
Before they begin to rebound

And now it’s my pleasure to present the 2009
National Championship Trophy
To Coach Roy williams and the North Carolina Tar Heels
You can just tell the unity you had
It’s something very special
And we saw it on the floor tonight

SG: Oh yeah—
Michigan thought we was playing some football
Lions’ stadium; they played like the Lions
Throwin interceptions in the first down
Watchin us dunk on their ass
Goin home cryin

Congratulations Wayne
I know you’re emotional
Talk about what this feels like

WE: Feels great. You know,
You never know what this feeling feels like
Until you experience it.
It’s something that you really can’t explain

SG: Yeah, believe in your dreams
MG: Yeah, you know you can never explain the unexplainable

Buried in the article, though, the mass-market future of Auto-Tune is revealed:

T-Pain and Auto-Tune’s parent company are finishing work on an iPhone app.

“It’s gonna be real cool,” says T-Pain. “Basically, you can add Auto-Tune to your voice and send it to your friends and put it on the Web. You’ll be able to sound just like me.”

Asked if that might render him no longer unique, T-Pain laughs: “I’m not too worried. I got lots of tricks you ain’t seen yet. It’s everybody else that needs to step up their game.”

Yep – now everybody with an iPhone will be able to create their own version of T-Pain classics, like I’m In Love Wit A Stripper. 

There are now hundreds of iPhone music applications. Few of them are more than sample-based gimmicks, and it’s rarer still for an iPhone music app to be a really interesting musical tool. 

Does the world really need an iPhone Auto-Tune app?

Brian Eno discusses autotune and using it as a creative tool.

For $129, everybody can now sound like T-Pain and Cher. 

Do you believe in Pain? Get ready for an explosion of the Auto-Tune effect in YouTube videos!

Designed to make almost everything automatic, Auto-Tune EFX provides two different flavors of the Auto-Tune Vocal Effect, as well as real-time pitch correction. Users select their desired effect type, set the key and scale of their track, and Auto-Tune EFX does the rest.

For songs with complex chord progressions or modulations, one can optionally set up custom scales or use their host’s automation facility to allow the processing of virtually any vocal line.

Note that Auto-Tune EFX requires an iLok USB key, which is included – but plan on kissing a USB slot goodbye. 

“In addition to its position as the professional-standard pitch correction tool, Auto-Tune has gained renown as the tool of choice for what has become one of the signature vocal sounds of our time,” said Marco Alpert, Antares VP of Marketing. “Most recently, its use by T-Pain (and many others in the pop, R&B and hip-hop communities) has ignited intense interest in the effect and introduced the magic of Auto-Tune to an even larger community of musicians and producers. As a result, we designed Auto-Tune EFX to be an affordable, easy-to-use tool that will allow pretty much anyone to use genuine Evo Voice Processing Technology to create these effects and perform basic real-time pitch correction.”

Auto-Tune EFX is available now for RTAS (Mac OS X and PC), VST (Mac OS X and PC) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a U.S. MSRP of $129.00. All Macintosh versions are universal binaries.

This is just plain scary – this video shows Britney Spears performing at a Las Vegas concert with just her voice track – none of the backing tracks or vocal tracks she’s lip syncing too.

View it all the way through, if you can bear it – and you’ll understand why they invented Auto-Tune.

Like previous versions of Auto-Tune, Auto-Tune Evo provides the ability to correct the pitch of a voice or solo instrument in real time, without distortion or artifacts, while preserving expressive nuance.

Auto-Tune Evo includes an Automatic Mode for real-time pitch correction as well as a Graphical Mode that displays the pitch envelope of the audio to be corrected, along with a selection of graphical tools that allow precise manipulation of the performance’s pitch.

Auto-Tune Evo is available now for TDM (Mac OSX and PC), RTAS (Mac OSX and PC), VST (Mac OSX and PC) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a U.S. MSRP of $399.00 for the Native versions and $649.00 for TDM versions. All Macintosh versions are universal binaries.

Upgrades to Auto-Tune Evo are available for purchase and download by current registered Auto-Tune owners.

Details below.

New Features

GENERAL FEATURES

• Dramatically enhanced core technology. Evo(tm) Voice Processing Technology takes advantage of the power of today’s computers to provide powerful new features and enhanced tracking and correction capabilities.
• Redesigned user interface. Continuing the process begun with Auto-Tune 5, Antares has once again refined the Auto-Tune user interface to allow for smoother, more intuitive workflow.
• Reorganized common controls. With the addition of the new pitch shifting, formant correction, and throat modeling capabilities, Antares has reorganized the common control area to ensure that all of the parameters used by both Automatic and Graphical correction modes are easily available at all times.

AUTOMATIC MODE FEATURES

• Real-time pitch shifting (Native versions only). Auto-Tune Evo’s new Transpose control provides extremely high-quality real-time pitch shifting over a two-octave range.
• Formant correction (Native versions only). While Auto-Tune’s classic pitch adjustment technology still provides the optimum results for the very small intervals typical of conventional pitch correction, for larger intervals or outright pitch-shifting, engaging Auto-Tune Evo’s Formant Correction function preserves vocal character over a much wider pitch-shift range.
• Throat modeling (Native versions only). Utilizing the latest incarnation of Antares’ Ao unique throat modeling technology, the new Throat Length control actually allows you to modify vocal character by passing it through a variable-length physical model of the human vocal tract.

GRAPHICAL MODE FEATURES

• Massively resizable Graphical Mode window. In most hosts, Auto-Tune Evo’s Graphical Mode window can be resized in real-time, limited only by the size of the user’s monitor.
• New Note-based pitch correction and pitch shifting. In addition to Lines and Curves, Auto-Tune Evo introduces an entirely new method of pitch editing: Note Objects. When using Note Objects, Auto-Tune Evo analyzes the tracked audio and creates graphic representations of the target notes. These objects can then easily be edited, shifted in pitch, and individually pitch corrected or retuned.
• Object-based Retune Speed settings. In one of Auto-Tune Evo’s functionally most powerful changes, Retune Speed is now an independent property of each individual correction object (Curve, Line or Note), making it easy to get the optimum rate for each note of a performance.
• Real-time display of output pitch. In addition to Auto-Tune’s traditional Tracked Pitch, Line, and Curve plots, Auto-Tune Evo provides a new real-time Output Pitch plot that displays the exact output pitch based on the current Retune Speed.
• Comprehensive programmable keyboard shortcuts. For ease of editing workflow, Auto-Tune Evo’s new Key Binding system lets virtually any Graphical Mode function to be assigned to each of the QWERTY number keys.
• New Pitch Graph display mode. A new “Lanes” display mode is particularly useful when using Note Objects for pitch correction or pitch-shifting individual notes.
• Graphical Paste function. The new Paste function displays a graphic representation of copied data and lets a user visually place it at the desired destination before finalizing the Paste. Perfect for copying Note Object-based edits to other parts of a track.
• Enhanced pitch displays. Auto-Tune Evo provides simultaneous displays of Tracked Pitch, Correction Object Pitch, and the resulting Output Pitch at the current cursor location.
• Nudge controls for pitch correction objects. To aid precise editing, the new Nudge controls let a user move selected object(s) up or down in precise one pixel increments.