Listening to music off-key

[xwindows]

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:

• "Livin' la Vida Loca" in PALspeed (Draco Rosa/Desmond Child feat. Ricky Martin; original version here)
• "Sealed with a Kiss" in key +1.5 (Peter Udell/Gary Geld, cover version feat. The Hounds; original source here)
• "Take Me To Your Heart" in key -2 (Michael Learns To Rock; original version here)
• "Hasty Santa Claus" in key -0.5 (Asei Kobayashi/Osamu Yoshioka feat. Saeko Shuu; original version here)
• "Sunflower's Promise" in key -0.5 (Motohiro Hata; original version here)
• "The Promise of the World" in key +1.5 (Yumi Kimura, cover version feat. Moonbow Music Movie; original source here)
• "Song of Stars" in key -3 (BuzzG, Rumdarjun arr. feat. ShonenT x Suzumu; original source here)
• "Happy Halloween" in key -3 (Junky, English cover feat. JubyPhonic; original source here)
• "Love" in key +1.5 (Gen Hoshino, Sum arr. English cover feat. Jefferz; original source here)
• "Cantarella (Grace Edition)" in key -2 (Kurosa, English cover feat. Zoobuh; original source here)
• "Splash Splash Love" in key +1 (Kuma no Kiyomi/Giga feat. un:c; original version here)
• "Long Night" in key +2 (Jumbo256 feat. Crypton's CV02-M; original version here)
• "Burma Prates" in inverse-PALspeed (Tuan-Sri Worawan, -UHU- arr. ska instrumental cover; original source here)

(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.

[xwindows]

I actually also have some more-extreme pitch shifts preference for several songs; which when done with simplistic speed-up/down method, would resulted in a too-hurried (or too-lazy) pace that mismatched with the mood of that song.

However, someone recently introduced me to a nifty free(dom) command line program called Rubber Band, which pitch-shifts music without changing its tempo (and/or time-stretches/shrink it), and does so in a quite-decent quality without too much fiddling with the knobs. (1)

While I had to tweak its version 2.0.2 C++ source code + build script a bit to make it build and install under my vintage GNU/Linux system, and it's not capable of live/real-time pitch-shifting (2) as well as not preventing vocalists from going chipmunk or orc; these are limitations I can live with.

(The program actually has been existing like... 20 years now, and also comes with LADSPA and LV2 plugin; so if you use libre DAW like Audacity or Ardour, you can join in the fun as well)

Here are some example songs, with each with a short audio sample that's applied with my favorite key shift with Rubber Band, as well as a link to its original for comparison:

• "Little Love Song" in key +3 (MONGOL800, English cover arr./feat. Justen Kuwabatake; original source here)
• "Brave Heart" in key +4.5 (Ayumi Miyazaki, English cover feat. Hiltonium; original source here)
• "Walking in the Center of the World" in key +2.5 (Natsushiro Takaaki, English chorus cover feat. Froggie x CammieMile x SirHamnet x Zoozbuh x Nansu; original source here)
• "Imagination Forest" in key +3.5 (Jin, feat. Yoshida Takumi x Ryousuke Nakanish; original source here)
• "Starlight Parade" in key +2.5 (Sekai no Owari, cover feat. Amatsuki x Tokyo Fantasy's FUKASEJP; original source here)
• "Sweet" in key +2.5 (1) (Pramote Vilepana; original version here)

And there is one counterexample, which custom-tuned pitch-shifting with older pure time-domain speed compensation using SoX (2) worked better:

• "Earth Day" in key -1.5 (Rozeo Emblem; original source here)

(1) Rubber Band 2.0.2 struggled when I pitch-shifted the second-last example; which I had to resort to trial-and-error for more-extreme settings combinations, and the result is still audibly smudged. You might have better luck if you got a newer Rubber Band version (I think current one is 4.0).

(2) Not long before this, I have been using Pitch filter in another free(dom) command line audio editor SoX, that uses simpler time-based audio fragment repetition/overlap-search method (WSOLA algorithm). It worked somewhat okay for +/-2 semitones shift (less okay when shifted higher than that), but often required me to tune and jot down the parameters in song-by-song fashion. (3) But some songs --especially percussion-heavy ones-- still come out with speed-shift artifacts no matter how hard I tuned it.

However, WSOLA is a single-pass process, which means SoX does support live pitch shifting; I can easily apply my Unix Superpower (TM) to chain FFmpeg and SoX's `play` program together (applying the Pitch filter in the latter), and listen to pitch-shifted version of the song without ever having to save the WAVE file to disk first. So even with the Rubber Band program installed; for songs that pitch-shift well with SoX, I would still listen to them via SoX. Disks are expensive nowadays, you know.

(3) I personally start with tuning of 30 ms/slice and 10 ms search range; and the sample of counterexample "Earth Day" is shifted using this exact tuning.