Automatic Accompaniment

A little over a year ago, when I dressed up as Bono for Halloween, someone asked me if I could sing a couple chords for him, thereby proving either a lack of musical knowledge, or a misunderstanding of the limitations of human vocal cords. For those who, like him, do not know what a chord is, it is simply any combination of three or more tones played together.

What kind of hit me today, though, (and I find it rather funny), is that whenever we sing, we always imagine a bunch of harmony going on in the background. When you sing your favorite guitar or keyboard part to a song, you can only sing one note at a time, so for any part that has chords or harmonies, you can't actually sing it as it is. This is one reason why when people, like my dad and Jack Black, try to rock out air-guitar style and sing, it's embarrassing.

This leads me to an interesting pondering--when we hear someone singing a song, how much do we fill in the background for people? Does our brain naturally fill in the harmonies? Will we automatically like someone singing a song we know a cappella more than someone else singing a song we don't know a cappella, simply because we can let our brain be the backing band, regardless of whether we really actually like the song? Hmm...

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to sing your own harmonies, though? I mean without a studio. I'm talking to you, Brandon Flowers. You still sound great, though.

Going Along With Intelligent Music Technology...

I just thought of something pretty cool that's kind of from the same vein as my last post.

I'm the kind of person who really likes to sing wherever I go--particularly in big spaces with good, echoing acoustics.

What if there was a room where you could go and when you sang, the walls, which had giant screens on them, just lit up with stuff based on what you sang? What if they could even understand the words you sang and even displayed them back (or even did something like what happens when Squidward's time machine breaks and he says the word "Alone"? If you watch SpongeBob, you know what I'm talking about).

This technology shouldn't really be that far off, right? I know they already have something similar to this for the images that are displayed when you play music in Windows Media Player.

It would be cool if you could tweak the room or have different settings for it, like different amounts of reverb and stuff.

Also, I would definitely like it being able to respond to me randomly, so that I didn't know what it was going to do. For example, I might sing a line or something and it would start producing a guitar sound to go along with it, and then the guitar line would keep going for a little bit after. Or it might just be random in its alteration of my voice--it might have some reverb one time, then it might have some drastic processing effects so that I sound like I'm coming through a radio or a TV, or like I'm a computer, or it might auto-tune my voice, or use an octave effect, or whatever. And what if it absorbed my voice so well that all I heard back was my altered voice? I didn't even hear my regular voice at all--it's like I actually sound like what I'm hearing?!? That would be so cool! If you had a harmonizer setting, you could sound just like Imogen Heap in "Hide And Seek" (for the unacquainted, this is the song that is sampled in the chorus of "Whatcha Say" by Jason Derulo.)

Maybe someday I'll have to design this room.

If iTunes Were Really Smart...

I just got to thinking what would really make me impressed with Apple...

What if this heralded program iTunes didn't just randomly play your playlist, but had an option to arrange songs in an order that made sense according to style and tempo and mood and all that, so that you didn't have super awkward transitions between songs? What if iTunes knew what good artists know--how to tastefully put songs in sequence: not necessarily so that all songs that are alike are together, but just so that the contrasts are pleasant, and breathe more meaning into each of the songs.

Now that I'm on the topic, may I point out the fact that I think the art of producing an album and not just a collection of songs is something I admire a great deal in artists. My favorite artists all, generally, are those who have a sense that an album is a work in itself, and can be more than the sum of its parts if done correctly. The most thematically cohesive album in my opinion? Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends by Coldplay. It is a sparkling gem of an album, with many of its songs having to do with cycles (of monarchs, of war, of revenge, of despair, etc). Beautiful.