hippiechick wrote: 
The only way future Britneys won't embarrass themselves is not to perform in public - try listening to Taylor Swift or Avril Lavigne live - Antares is the only reason some of these folks are making money - and, I agree, there are definitely applications for pitch massagers - I just don't think that ubiquitous enhancement is a good thing for music, as an industry or in terms of individual musicians.

Thee are many great musicians out there who won't get a shot because they don't conform to a 12-tone scale, and won't pitch massage themselves into that box - what would Bob Dylan's career have been like under those terms, or Neil Young's, or John Hiat's?

 brandog wrote: 
I think that there are loads of possibilities as a creative tool, like the way Kanye uses it to alter notes. At least future Britneys no longer have to embarrass themselves in public. Anyone remember hearing CS&N singing Judy Blue Eyes at Woodstock? so out of tune, but no one cared.

 jagdriver wrote: 
There was a piece on NPR Weekend Edition (Sunday) a few months back - Liane Hansen participated in a before-and-after singing demo of Antares - IMO both ends of the experiment were gruesome :)

I use Antares to tweak up natural sounds to make them sound just unnatural enough to be unnerving - I find that Antares is being overused, even abused in the industry; essentially over-tuning the ears of (most especially) young listeners, creating a cotton-candy texture of tonal purity that not only does not exist in 'real' music but, will cause those accustomed to it to reject unenhanced music as "bad." 

I think, for the most part, Antares and it's ilk are not good tools for good musicians but are excellent tools for simulating silk purses from sows' ears (and visa versa.)

 jagdriver wrote: 
Great show! I really enjoyed it.

There's also a short bit, if you look on June offerings, about Antares' Auto-Tune software that is used to enhance singers who sometimes may have sung a note or two away from where they should have sung. It's also used in some pop offerings (Cher, et al.) to deliberately weird out their voice. Pretty cool stuff!

I had wanted to work at Antares, but just as I was applying, I discovered they had moved from my present location to somewhere around Santa Cruz, CA.....much too far to commute and I don't want to move yet.

 jagdriver wrote: 
Original worked for me... but now that I look at it, I had heard about a different program, something about culture and radio etc and influences... Gonna have to do some  to find it but this looks cool too.

I get an error using the original link. Try this one instead: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/programs/

 jagdriver wrote: 
Thanks... I heard about this but hadn't looked for it yet. I hope I can get to see it before it expires....

Why do we like some music and not other tracks/artists/pieces? PBS's Nova examines the topic in Musical Minds. It's fastinating!

You can stream it from PBS only througth July 7... after that the DVD is $45. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/musicminds/program.html

I have no $take in this... I just found it VERY intriguing and thought you all might, too.

 n4ku wrote: 
Way cool!