Installing Melodyne - which is compatible with any Mac OS above 9.0.4, including Mac OS X - is simple. The Detect Melody dialogue, showing some of the specialised Detection routines for processing different types of material. While it usually requires monophonic audio, it works on drum and percussion loops and will also process strummed guitar. It can force audio of different tempos to run at one tempo, quantise audio timing, correct pitching errors across an entire track or one note at a time, superimpose pitch information from one melody onto another without affecting lyrics, alter amplitude, edit transitions between notes, and even alter vibrato. It allows you to create harmonies from one vocal, or indeed construct whole new melodies, as well as making vocals and instruments do things they couldn't normally do. It can shift the pitch of monophonic audio without changing duration, change duration or tempo with or without changing pitch, and manipulate formants to alter voice or instrument character or to improve the character of shifted audio.
Melodyne is currently a stand‑alone application for Mac (a PC version is coming), and its purpose in life is to analyse audio minutely and then process it such that almost everything about it can be altered at will. You can choose to view the notation under the waveform, if preferred. Notation is overlaid on the waveform, which now shows different pitches. Less than a year on, Melodyne has reached release level. The small team behind Melodyne first came to the attention of the hi‑tech music world early this year, when they attended the Los Angeles NAMM show to publicise their high‑quality audio processing and manipulation software, which is based on some unusual and rather secret technology. However, labelling is on the way for the next version.įew recent software products have stirred as much interest as Melodyne - a program offering unique pitch, time and formant‑processing features, which was created not by one of the major music developers but by a maverick Bavarian musician and his software‑designer friend. You can also see the mixer interface, which has no track labelling, making it hard to know what you're muting, soloing and panning. The shadowy blue stripes in the background provide a quarter‑note timing 'grid'.
The top one is un‑Detected, which is why it's not showing separate pitches like the others. Melodyne's main Arrange page, with three audio tracks in it.