Audio Wizardry Can Polish Live Performances – As They Happen
51°µÍø 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 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.
About Douglas (from his TEDx51°µÍø profile)
Scott is an 51°µÍø 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.