Home
Entrar
Registrar
Loading...
Praticar Escuta
Ouvir
/
Video
/
It's Okay To Be Smart
/
You're not gonna believe who invented autotune
You're not gonna believe who invented autotune
Selecionar modo de aprendizagem:
Ver legendas
Escolher palavra
Reescrever palavra
Highlight:
3000 Oxford Words
4000 IELTS Words
5000 Oxford Words
3000 Common Words
1000 TOEIC Words
5000 TOEFL Words
Legendas (52)
0:00
♪ Do you believe in life after love ♪
0:05
(glass shattering) (cat yowling)
0:06
- Here's the story of
0:07
how Big Oil changed pop music forever.
0:10
By inventing auto-tune?
0:12
It all traces back to this guy, Andy Hildebrand.
0:15
In the 1980s, Andy's job was to help Exxon
0:17
look for oil using software.
0:19
The way they look for oil is
0:20
by sending sound waves into the ground,
0:22
sort of like bats using echolocation to find food.
0:25
The reflections of those sound waves could help them
0:27
figure out what's down there.
0:29
But the ground has all sorts of different densities,
0:31
layers, textures.
0:32
This meant the signals were full of noise
0:34
and kind of hard to decipher.
0:36
So Andy developed a computer algorithm
0:37
that could isolate useful signals in all the noise.
0:40
After Andy retired from the oil business,
0:42
he decided to apply his math and computing skills
0:44
in an unexpected place, music.
0:46
(guitar strumming)
0:48
When you sing, what's really happening
0:49
is your vocal cords are vibrating
0:51
the nearby air molecules at a specific frequency.
0:53
If you wiggle the air 440 times per second,
0:56
it sounds like an A note,
0:57
but just like the noisy ground,
0:59
your voice doesn't produce one single clear note.
1:02
Your throat and head create all these extra overtones
1:04
and undertones that make your voice unique.
1:07
The thing is, all those extra tone in your voice
1:09
made it really hard for computers to fix off-key singing.
1:12
Andy figured out how to use the same signal processing
1:14
magic from his oil hunting days
1:16
to find a note in a singer's messy voice recording
1:19
and kind of nudge it into the right place.
1:21
First, it finds the primary pitch being sung by looking for
1:24
how long it takes certain patterns in a voice to repeat.
1:27
Then it uses some fancy math to split the recording
1:30
to different frequencies.
1:31
Now, those frequencies can be adjusted one by one,
1:33
while still retaining a person's unique vocal fingerprint.
1:37
That's how we get pitch correction
1:38
without sounding like a chipmunk.
1:40
♪ And the more you turn up the effect ♪
1:42
♪ The more the software makes big jumps from note to note ♪
1:46
Giving that distinct auto-tune pattern that we all know.
1:49
And just like that, from the oil field
1:51
to the recording studio, auto-tune was born.
1:54
Follow me for more cool science videos.
