When listening to music on my computer; there has been one habit of mine, started around 1.5 decade ago when I was first exposed to a serious audio editing software-- which one of the things I tried was shifting pitch of music files on my machine. Many times, I would find a new pitch "pleasing" to listen to, or evoke interesting feeling; and sometimes I would even like the shifted version as much as (or more than) the original-- which I would also save a shifted version for my future listening.
This habit carries on to today, though my choice of software is now different.
Note that what I mean isn't necessarily limited to things like Nightcore
(0). While I like to listen many songs off-key, Nightcore is actually
not my thing:
key shifts I use is usually quite low and being
in both up and down direction (usually in -3 to +3 range), sometimes with half-keys and weird fractions like PALspeed
(1) or inverse-PALspeed
(2) in the mix; and I would use different key shift for different song.
The player program I'm using for shifting the pitch at playback nowadays is just an old-school
MPlayer (3), which the shifting method is simply changing playback speed, akin to increasing/decreasing the speed of cassette tape or phonograph record; changing both pitch and tempo at the same time. Sometimes I also ended up using audio editor (usually Audacity) to make a permanently-shifted version of the file if I ended up listening to shifted version often enough to justify extra disk space, or needed shifting method that was more sophisticated than merely speeding up/down.
Here are some of the songs which I often listen off-key, each with a short audio sample that's applied with my favorite key shift, as well as a link to its original for comparison:
(Note that all of my key-shifted samples here are in Ogg Vorbis format; sorry iOS users)
Anybody else like listening to music off-key here? (Including Nightcore, if that's your thing) If you do...
- What software and method you normally use for shifting the pitch, or playing with the pitch shifted?
- Do you make use of fractional-semitone or arbitrary-percent shifting?
- Do you have specific songs that you liked to listen with shifted key particularly?
- And do you have different favorite shift amount for each of your favorite song individually?
(0) I'm using the following definition of Nightcore: a speed change caused by playing 33+1/3 RPM LP record on 45 RPM turntable, i.e. 135% speed of the original (+5.20 semitones shifted). If you use a different definition, please state in your reply.
(1) Fraction of 25/24 (~104.167%) speed, which is the pitch shift usually caused by movie distributor telecining 24 FPS film into 25 FPS PAL-region of VHS or DVD release. My use of this is unrelated telecining matters however.
(2) Fraction of 24/25 (96%) speed, which is normally applied to correct pitch in PALspeed-affected materials; but in this context, I sometimes apply this on unaffected materials because it gave interesting result on some songs.
(3) Manually configured to change speed in +/-1% per step.
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