PERCEPTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF VOICES
Do people love the sound of their voice?
When one note of music is produced in front of listeners, it hits their sound space. When two notes of music reach the same aural field of the same listener, they touch the same space yet they remain distinct; they do not diminish each other: they sound through each other. It can go further: in the same perceptual space, a musical note can enrich another. Then there is a sympathetic resonance.
How can musical notes be in resonance? Between one note and another, one frequency and another or one pitch and another, there is what is called an interval. According to the notes they separate, the various intervals have different names.
One of the sounds most people hear everyday is their own voices. And often they have had the opportunity to hear a recording of their voice. Curiously, a lot of them do not like how it sounds. Why? Physically speaking, when people hear their voice going out of their mouth, they also hear their vocal chords vibrating inside their throat, the external and internal voice mixing. Yet when they listen to a recording of your voice, they only perceive the external one and they feel the result is strange. Happily, over time, all can learn to love their recorded voice.
Music recordings and voice transformation
Music listeners may appreciate various elements in music: chords, melodies and, of course, the voice of a performer. Before being heard by music listeners, singers’ voices are fine-tuned by mixing engineers. Some engineers focus on the technical aspects of a song, other ones are more interested in the musical side of things. In any case, when they are working on a multi-track, they first clean up tracks, getting rid of undesired noise, analyzing the reverberation of vocals, etc. Then, when they know how they want a song to sound, they do the mix itself.
What do engineers do with voices? It depends on each voice they hear. For example, they may want to give some warmth to a powerful voice so that it does not take the head of the listeners off. To obtain the results they want, they mainly play with frequencies, not only to modify the voice itself, but to change elements linked to the material used for each recording. In fact, two recordings of the same song by the same singer may be totally different, because the two)recordings are not made with the same type of microphones, for instance.
Musically speaking, engineers may change a voice to suit a specific context. Thus they will modify it so that it sounds ‘retro’, ‘trendy’, ‘radio-friendly’, etc. That part of their work is more subjective, even if it may be linked to criteria like the music genre or form.