“Breathing is something singers seem to insist on doing…” according to what the software house Waves claims presenting its new plug-in DeBreath. Thus, in order to solve this annoying inconvenient, digital technology has created this application that reduces or eliminates the breath sounds form the audio tracks. The vocal signal, in fact, can be separated into two elements, one containing only voice, the other only breaths and each can be processed differently. The risk that you face when using a tool like this is to produce some vocals that don’t belong to the human nature and sound like the product of a synthesizer. The use of filters is a common practice in recording studios and because of that the voices of singers recorded on commercial CDs usually don’t sound natural, but artificial as if Barbie or GI Joe are singing. This commercial application follows the opposite direction of the work in progress towards naturalness of artworks based on text-to-speech (see the recent Amy and Klara by Marc Bolhen). On the one hand in fact there is the progressive antropomorphisation of the machines, while on the other the human being is made more similar to an android, according to the attitude of a paranoid society that develops biometric systems in order to change the human body into a password.

Valentina Culatti