February 19th, 2009 10:27am
Sinking Deeper Every Day
Shout Out Out Out Out “Guilt Trips Sink Ships”
I wonder if there is a cultural reason why so much of the music that is fashionable today features vocals that have been obviously treated with studio effects, often severe enough to transform the natural sound of the performer. Perhaps many of us relate to the subtext of a person burying their identity, or altering it in a way to become more acceptable to others. Maybe it’s to do with how we have the option of living much of our lives in a mediate state, in which we are offered the opportunity to construct our identities as we please on the internet and in games. Either way, it’s difficult for me to hear things like severe autotune, vocoder, or extreme reverb applied to the human voice without thinking that the singer is trying to hide and/or become someone or something else.
Shout Out Out Out Out, a synth-funk band from Edmonton, use what sounds like a vocoder on a majority of their songs. In context, it seems rather matter of fact, as though the band have hired a big clunky sci-fi robot as their lead singer. In using this effect, the group draw on a long history of robo-voices in electronic dance music, but whereas this sound can often feel harsh and cold, their digital voice is mellow, soft, and relatively warm. As “Guilt Trips Sink Ships” unfolds and builds toward a series of ecstatic crests, the robotic voice manages to feel both precise and cheerful, emphasizing the composition’s feeling of relaxed bliss.
Visit the Shout Out Out Out Out website.
2/19/09 11:05 am
The whole question of what seems “natural” is a vexed one, of course. I think I read that when Bing Crosby became popular with his “crooning” vocal style (entirely dependent upon the microphone, since singing that intimately in the presence of a full orchestra could never be heard otherwise), critics claimed he couldn’t “really” sing, or that it was absurd that such an artificial, obviously “false” recording should be accepted. And many changes in perception of what’s “natural” vs. what’s “overproduced” have come along over time. No one nowadays bats an eye if an acoustic guitar seems to be as loud as a trombone section - even though, acoustically, that’s pretty much impossible.
Or consider the way the piano has come to connote “intimacy.” On one level, this makes sense: it’s playable by one person, and the instrument is the sort of thing that might be in a person’s house rather than an impersonal recording space…but on another, it’s sort of absurd: a piano is a tremendously complex machine, large and heavy and not the sort of thing to be carted around, or used to serenade a loved one outside a bedroom window, for example. Same’s true with a string section: it sounds “romantic” until we actually visualize a bunch of string players hanging around in the background while the singer confesses romantic intimacies.
Point is, I guess: twenty years from now, maybe vocodering, AutoTuning, and the like will seem as unremarkable as standard studio EQing, light reverb, or double-tracking - none of which cause much occasional for comment as to “naturalness,” even though they are, of course, all completely artificial products of the studio recording process.
2/19/09 11:14 am
Oh yeah, definitely. That’s not really what I’m thinking about though — it’s more about those connotations, and what we are getting out of this. Why is this connecting right now? And I’m not just talking about autotune/vocoder, I mean all the indie stuff that’s all about heavily reverbed voices, shoegaze mutated into this digital ghost thing. That’s the flipside of the T-Pain thing, or the sort of mainstream pop music where notes are digitally nudged into “perfection.”