How Does Autotune Work, Really? - Xavier Riley - ADC22

audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon
How Does Autotune Work, Really? - Xavier Riley - ADC22
Autotune has captivated music producers and consumers for over 20 years, but what is the technical wizardry behind its success? We will take a deep dive into the original Autotune patent to learn more.
Slides: link will be updated when available.
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Xavier Riley
I'm currently a PhD student in the Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) program at Queen Mary University of London. My research interests are wide ranging! At the moment they focus on pitch tracking/perception and automatic music transcription.
Prior to the PhD I worked in web development, including a stint at Heroku from 2015-2020, so I'm also interested in web based audio applications. I'm also a core contributor to the Sonic Pi project which enables a wide range of people from school age upwards to live code music using a subset of Ruby to control SuperCollider. Last but not least I'm a massive jazz nerd and play guitar and double bass all over the South East.
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd - online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC22 Team:
Lina Berzinskas
Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
#audiodevcon #audiodev #autotune

[@crosswick]

Great talk. One thing I seem to remember from reading the patent is that he further reduces the number of lags investigated by only selecting those that belong to the chromatic scale, tuned to a preset reference like 440Hz

[@xavriley]

Thanks! I think you might be thinking of the constriction to chromatic notes happens on the output stage. It tunes notes to their nearest chromatic note by default, but has options for selecting scales/keys as well along with a slew parameter for how quickly it locks to the new pitch. You still have to look at all the input lags because the singer's pitch isn't guaranteed to use any kind of pitch reference at all

[@yokljo]

Great visualisations. I found this super interesting, and have brought it up in various conversions because it's so surprisingly simple and doesn't even use a fourier transform!