Audio Wizardry Can Polish Live Performances – As They Happen
SMU Engineering Professor Scott Douglas talks about manipulating audio in real time to enhance a singer's performance.
“What I want to show is that you can take a voice and manipulate it on the fly and basically add chords to it,” Douglas told Jerome Weeks of Art & Seek in an interview that aired on KERA public radio on Friday, December 2.
Essentially, he means instant Auto-tuning, Weeks reported. Most people know Auto-tune as the digital recording process that makes singers like T-Pain sound like robots.
Read about or listen to Douglas's interview with Weeks.
About Douglas (from his TEDxSMU profile)
Scott is an SMU professor, researcher, educator-entrepreneur and jazz-lover whose lifelong passion is sound and music. He developed one of the first successful procedures for the active cancellation of sound in a room over 15 years ago. More recently, he developed mathematical techniques for picking out and recording individual voices in a crowd using several microphones in tandem.
Educated at Stanford University as an electrical engineer, Scott co-authored the first engineering textbook for high school students for The Infinity Project, a national award-winning middle school, high school and early college engineering curricula. Scott has been featured in live and recorded radio and television shows including NPR and WFAA-TV. An avid singer and musician, Scott’s preferred instrument is the saxophone, and while he loves all forms of music, his favorite is jazz.