Long before he was helping singers find the right note, Harold Hildebrand spent 17 years looking for oil. It was a strange career path for a man whose first love was music. Hildebrand had been playing the flute professionally since the age of 13, and he'd attended the University of Illinois on a music scholarship. But rather than looking to make his fortune in the concert hall, Hildebrand completed a degree in electrical engineering and applied for a job with Exxon Mobil.
Soon, the young whiz had developed a way to find oil using sound. Exploration crews would set off underground dynamite charges, and then, using a technique known as autocorrelation, they would measure the pitch of returning sound waves and use the data to pinpoint oil rich areas. Traditionally, oil companies discovered oil at the end of a drill bit. Exploration crews would roam the seafloor and the countryside, repeatedly boring into the ground until they struck something interesting. With Hildebrand's innovation, they could now get a good idea of the subsurface long before breaking ground.
Auto-tune has become incredibly common and much more noticeable in recent years. Learn how auto-tune works. Somewhat unrelated, but if you have made it this far I will throw in one more bit of advice: If you are going to be using pitch correction software on the final vocal, do not auto-tune in autopilot and fix every note. Much of the energy and emotion of a song comes from vocalists singing slightly above.
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The technique saved Exxon millions of dollars, and they paid Hildebrand handsomely. By age 40, the engineer had earned more than enough cash to retire. Instead, in the early 1990s, he gathered up his petrodollars and founded Antares Audio Technologies, a quirky music software company in the small California town of Scotts Valley. Hildebrand had learned a lot about sound in the world's oil fields, and with Antares, he aimed to channel that knowledge into the music studio. The company's first invention was Infinity, a program that allowed samples of music to be strung together in flawless, repeating loops. Later products included a host of voice-changers and the Microphone Modeller, a program that can mimic the sound of any microphone, be it a vintage vector microphone or a bluesy harmonica microphone.
LiveXLive Media, Inc. (NASDAQ:LIVX) is a global digital media company dedicated to music and live entertainment. Watch live events and festivals around the world including Bryce Vine, Bryce Vine, Bryce Vine, Bryce Vine, Bryce Vine, Silversun Pickups. Aug 25, 2010 As the debate about the X Factor using Auto-Tune rages, Daily Express Reporter Sophie Donnelly visits a recording studio to investigate the controversial sof. But after several takes trying to get auto tune to work, and ruling out all other factors, they realized that Parker was singing in tune, preventing the thing from working. You had to be a bad singer in order for that thing to actually sound the way it does Trey Parker.
Does Auto Tune Work On Live Concerts 2018
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But the company's most famous creation came about because of a jokey mealtime quip. While Hildebrand was having lunch with a sales rep, the man's wife said something along the lines of, 'Hey Andy, how about inventing something that could make me sing in tune?' Intrigued, Hildebrand took her up on the challenge. He had used autocorrelation to find crude oil -- who's to say he couldn't use it to nudge a bad singer into tune?