Project 1: Buy U a Drank

For this project I wanted to dive into something I’ve been curious about for years now: auto-tune. I was never quite sure how the process exactly was achieved, so I aimed to mimic it to the best of my abilities and potentially make it more suitable for live work.

That being the case, I traversed through a plethora of pitch-detecting and pitch-shifting max objects, be it pitch~, sigmund~, gizmo~, pitchshift~,  fzero~, etc. and I finally came upon retune~, and found it to be sufficient for what I was aiming to do. It allowed me to get a decent estimate of incoming frequencies and shift them to match certain scales. In order to do so, I had to map out intervals in cents and create lists that could be accessed easily by the program so that the latency wouldn’t get too bad.

I also decided to add on a couple different features to this core idea. I allowed for the autotuning of a file or of the microphone input on the computer. In addition, I plugged in my assignment 4 patch to allow me to record and manipulate some newly autotuned audio. Finally, I added a sonogram to highlight the rigidity of the processed audio and two nsliders displaying the original note of the signal next to the corrected note after processing.

Below is a recorded demonstration of the autotuning effects (the manipulation of recorded data within the patch will be demonstrated in class). Apologies for not actually attempting to sing Buy U a Drank, I figured even with auto-tune I can’t really be T-Pain…

And to go with it, here’s the patch!