Pitch Shift FXpertise – Record and Mix Strategies for the Broad Range Pitch Effect Possibilities

Presenter:
Alex Case, University of Massachusetts Lowell - Lowell, MA, USA

Pitch shift as an effect has been a part of sound recording from the very beginning of audio and continues to evolve briskly today. Recording at one speed but playing back at another has been the pitch shift modus operandi across all analog formats—cylinders, disks, and tape. Digital audio continued these time-domain techniques, exploiting sample rate differences between record and playback. The digital luxury of frequency-domain pitch shift, offering new effects possibilities, became an important part of the pop engineer’s tool kit in the late 90s.

From this are born a seemingly endless set of pitch-based outcomes. But what are we to make of the aesthetic possibilities? How do we organize its creative potential? Alex U. Case auditions a curated set iconic examples of pitch shifting effects in pop music and analyses them through multiple lenses—music, signal processing and psychoacoustics—to define the full range of the effect, giving it structure, and empowering you to develop your own strategies for the use of Pitch FX in your next project.