DNA-Some kind of hoax?
June 5, 2008
“We are delighted, with Direct Note Access, to have made a reality something of which we – and others too – have long dreamed.”
“Have you ever thought you could correct a wrong note in a piano recording or in a chord simply by moving it to the correct pitch? In future you will be able to modify the DNA (so to speak) of your audio material: to take the guitar track from your last jam session, for instance, transpose it from C major to F# minor and integrate it into the song you’re working on now.”
- Peter Neubäcker, inventor of Melodyne
When I first saw the preview of Celemony’s Direct Note Access (DNA), I checked my calendar to see if it was April 1st.
I’ve used Melodyne, their pitch correction tool, for a few years now, as I’ve had the “privilege” of working with some musicians who simply could not stay in tune.
Melodyne allows you to correct the pitch of monophonic (single note) instruments and voices, but with Direct Note Access, you can adjust individual notes in a polyphonic recording, meaning that if one voice in a choir is out of tune, you can fine-tune it to fit in. This gave me a severe bout of future shock at first. Has technology finally rendered talent obsolete? It certainly hasn’t replaced human imagination or creativity (yet).
Musical elitism and snobbery about technology can’t ever hope to halt the technological evolution of music. Music is an artform, and I think that it’s the artists that are the harbingers of change, rather than the inventors. Leo Fender didn’t foresee Jimi Hendrix’s screaming, feedback-laden rendition of The Star Spangled Banner when he designed the Stratocaster. The vast majority of music technology was originally designed for military and medical purposes (oscillators etc.)
My prediction is that this piece of technology, designed simply to correct the pitch of bad singers, will be used in ways that the inventor never imagined, to produce sounds never before heard. I’m quite looking forward to it.
