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The vocal effects of Daft Punk

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Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#61

It is unreal to me the amount of impact Daft Punk had with only four studio albums.

(They also did the Soundtrack for Tron:Legacy, basically their fifth studio album) Anyway, I keep remembering how panned 'Human After All' was, and how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House", while this is EXACTLY how the genre evolved in the years to come and none of those music experts saw this. Many journalists did a retrospective of it a few years later a…

how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House"

FWIW, I wouldn't call myself a particular fan of house or dance music in general. This mechanicalness and lack of warmth is probably what I like about the album.

Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(They also did the Soundtrack for Tron:Legacy, basically their fifth studio album) Anyway, I keep remembering how panned 'Human After All' was, and how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House", while this is EXACTLY how the genre evolved in the years to come and none of those music experts saw this. Many journalists did a retrospective of it a few years later a…

Tron:Legacy still lives in my head. I'm still chasing the music I imagined after seeing the movie/hearing the soundtrack. Also half of Daft Punk Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's work in Kavinsky’s 'Nightcall'.

The composer who assisted them also worked with M83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which I think is also pretty spectacular.

Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(They also did the Soundtrack for Tron:Legacy, basically their fifth studio album) Anyway, I keep remembering how panned 'Human After All' was, and how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House", while this is EXACTLY how the genre evolved in the years to come and none of those music experts saw this. Many journalists did a retrospective of it a few years later a…

Random Access Memories was such a letdown. It's an OK disco album that doesn't innovate at all. Masterful recording, it sounds great of course, but it didn't take any risks. I listened to it twice and that was it.

Guess you didn't listen to it on shuffle. There are multiple stories to be discovered depending on the order of tracks, like the one about the alien robot that crash lands on earth and strives to experience humanity. The album is RANDOM ACCESS Memories after all.

Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you listen to the example audio in the video? Soft synths and digital emulation can be absolutely amazing these days, but the VSM201 and Ultimate VoIS are in their own league. It’d be pretty easy to pick them out from a blind test with other vocoders. Oh, it also might be of interest that the IVL algorithm isn’t FFT-based. I think their harmonizers sound better than the rest, so maybe FFT isn’t the best way to go…

Yes exactly, I was really excited when I found out that you do not need a FFT to do speech processing. If you look at the code of (phone/voice) codecs GSM/Speex/Opus you can see that you can estimate the spectral envelope (or the configuration of a physical tube model for the vocal tract) in time domain with linear prediction coefficients (LPC). And it is simple, e.g. the often used Levinson-Durbin algorithm is just…

Ah yes, ladder or lattice filters. If you don't mind old fashioned mailing lists there's still a few of hanging around in MUSIC-DSP@LISTS.COLUMBIA.EDU where code gets shared.

Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random Access Memories was such a letdown. It's an OK disco album that doesn't innovate at all. Masterful recording, it sounds great of course, but it didn't take any risks. I listened to it twice and that was it.

Guess you didn't listen to it on shuffle. There are multiple stories to be discovered depending on the order of tracks, like the one about the alien robot that crash lands on earth and strives to experience humanity. The album is RANDOM ACCESS Memories after all.

The stories are maybe 1/10000th the importance of the quality of the music, which is simply Ok.

Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#68
post #44
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know the device. Also I didn't know that Kai Krause who later got famous through his Kai's Power Tools was an electronic music expert who sort of did sales for Sennheiser in 1977, according to this page ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sennheiser_VSM_201 - only on the German WP, it seems). He also wrote the manual for it. His German WP page also claims that he sold a VSM 201 to Neil Young in 1982! https://de.…

> His German WP page also claims that he sold a VSM 201 to Neil Young in 1982! Just in time for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_(album) !!!

Wow, six of nine tracks with the vocoder. I guess the 25k USD machine had to pay off :-)

Re: The vocal effects of Daft Punk

#70
I went down a similar rabbit hole at the start of my PhD and I wish I’d written more of it up. One of my theories is that they combined effects quite often. For example, “harder better faster stronger” seems more likely to be a talk box recorded for a single note, then looped, then run through an AutoTune rack unit with MIDI inputs to repitch it. I mention this a little bit in a talk I have at ADC 2022 https://youtu.be/uX-FVtQT0PQ?feature=shared
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