http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2004-07-06-late-performers_x.htmLate performers get chance to record live
Here's a reality show idea whose time is apparently coming: American Idol Poltergeist.
Long-deceased stars perform songs they'd never sung while alive, and viewers vote to send all but one back into oblivion. I'd tune in just to see Elvis, Jim Morrison, Patsy Cline and Judy Garland on disco night.
The first step in that direction is coming true now. Climbing the country music charts is (I Wanna Hear) A Cheatin' Song, a duet featuring Anita Cochran and Conway Twitty, who died a decade before the song was written. Cochran, who is very much alive, and her veteran country producer, Jim Ed Norman, used a computer to create Twitty's entirely new vocal out of snippets of his past recordings. (Related link: Listen to the song)
It is, in fact, a virtual Twitty.
Amazing as that is, the implications challenge the imagination. "This might be a glimpse over the horizon of speech synthesis," says Craig Devin, an expert on technology and music who helped Gibson design the first all-digital electric guitar.
Not only might it lead to artists performing new material from beyond the grave, Devin says, but think of this: "How about a (political) endorsement from FDR? Some modern political commentary from Winston Churchill?"
Perhaps even a John Kerry campaign radio ad by Michael Dukakis. Err, wait, maybe he's still alive.
On a darker note, Osama bin Laden could secretly die from choking on a chicken bone in a remote cave, but his supporters could keep his speeches coming, inserting references to recent events to preserve the illusion that he's alive.
But that all gets way ahead of the story, which starts more than a year ago with a phone call from Norman to Cochran. She was writing songs for her upcoming album God Created Woman. They had talked about asking one of her heroes to sing with her, and she had off-handedly responded, "Too bad Conway's not still alive."
She came home to a phone message from Norman: "Anita, I got this great idea. You may think I'm crazy, but you might get to record with Conway."
As Cochran recalls, "I was thinking, 'What is he thinking?' "
Singers have been resurrected before, but only by using a song the person actually recorded. Natalie Cole reconstituted Unforgettable as a duet with her late father, Nat King Cole, who had made it a hit in the 1950s. Hank Williams Jr. in 1989 sang with his late father Hank Williams on There's a Tear in My Beer, which the elder Williams had first recorded in 1952.
Norman produced the Williams' father-son duet. That helped spark Norman's idea that, 15 years later, computers might be able to do a lot more than just match up two existing vocal tracks.
"We realized we were on a technical adventure that had never been done," Norman says.
Before beginning, there were legal and emotional ramifications to work through. Norman and Cochran got the Twitty family's permission. Cochran is on the Warner Bros. Records label, and Twitty was, too, for part of his career. That made some legal issues easier because Warner had rights to a library of Twitty tapes.
The hardest part was the research. Cochran had to listen to Twitty CDs over and over. Depending on your point of view, that could be either a dream job ? or, for certain breeds of teenager, a form of torture that would've made the Inquisition proud. Twitty is famous for country songs such as Hello Darlin', It's Only Make Believe and Red Neckin' Love Makin' Night.
"Every time I heard an 'I' or a 'wanna' or any word we needed, I had to write down where it was in the song, the key it was sung in, the note, how it was phrased," Cochran says. To later weave Twitty's vocal, she'd have to find every word in the right note and sung the right way. It took most of a year.
"You can piece anything together," Norman says. The hard part, though, was "we had to make it emotional."
Once they found the snippets, they pulled them off the master tapes from Twitty's recording sessions and put them on a computer hard drive in digital form. They used Pro Tools ? software that's practically the standard for music recording these days ? to patch the pieces together and smooth transitions between words. Since the snippets were recorded at different volumes, they had to adjust the volume of every word.
But it worked. As Twitty's vocal comes in on the song, it sounds just as if he'd recorded live. "I got chills when I first heard his voice" singing the new song, Cochran says.
But now, what's next?
"Maybe someone else will come along and take it to a new level," Norman says.
Devin goes further, imagining that the work Cochran and Norman did by hand could eventually be automated.
"It is feasible that voice recognition software could identify the required phonemes, words and phrases," Devin says. "Pitch-correction algorithms could give them the appropriate register and inflection. Add artificial personality (software) to emulate a style and ... voila! Dead artist performs live."
Imagine what that would mean. Paul McCartney famously said: "As far as I'm concerned, there won't be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead." But what if John's voice could be revived? And George Harrison's? McCartney and Ringo Starr could make a momentous new Beatles album.
Animators, who need only the voices of actors and singers, could tap this technology, too.
Bing Crosby and Bob Hope could play wacky buddy fish in another Finding Nemo. Maybe Marlon Brando could be the next royal villain in a Shrek sequel. (Or maybe Brando should be in Nemo? as "Marlin" Brando.)
Advertisers would eat this up. McDonald's could get Elvis to sing its new jingle. Janis Joplin could wail about the pleasures of Apple's iPod.
Although, it's suggestions like those that prompt Norman to ask me: "Just because you can do it, does that mean you should?"
I'm not certain which is worse. The fact that she has created a song using a complete fabrication of the artist, or that she idolizes Conway Twitty.
I suppose this gives him even greater immortality, but at what cost to artistic expression.
I can imagine Madonna, Britney, and god knows how many other hacks are now out there establishing a library of words and phrases in multiple notes so that after they're gone, their estates can continue to turn out schlock.
Topic: Let them rest in peace! (Read 1444 times)