Listening to your friends butcher your favourite songs during karaoke could become a thing of the past, thanks to software created by scientists.
Their AI system can bring your pitch closer to the original artist's intentions, without making your voice sound robotic or artificial.
That means nuances in your voice are kept and that intentional vocal flourishes aren't completely erased.
Any minor wobbles, or even massive deviations from the pitch of a song, are simply moved closer to how the song was meant to be sung.
The software, which is not yet commercially available, does this by shifting the pitch of individual sung notes to align them more closely with the accompanying music.
Scroll down for audio clips
Listening to your friends butcher your favourite songs during karaoke nights could become a thing of the past, thanks to software created by scientists. Their AI system can bring your pitch closer to the original artist's, without making it sound overly robotic or artificial (stock image)
Most commercial autotuning systems require the user to input a melody score, or instructions to modulate pitch by a particular pitch or scale.
Sanna Wager, a PHD candidate and main author of the study at Indiana University, told New Scientist: 'When looking at how to correct the current note, we look at what the singer did over the past few seconds.'
The current tool must be applied to recordings after they have been made, but the end product could used to make changes on-the-fly.
Her paper, published on the pre-print repository Arxiv.org, contains audio samples of how a voice altered by the commercial version of the product could sound (below).
The AI system can bring your pitch closer to the original artist's intentions, without making your voice sound robotic or artificial. That means nuances in your voice are kept and that intentional vocal flourishes aren't completely erased (stock image)
The current tool must be applied to recordings after they have been made, but the end product could used to make changes on-the-fly. This clip is taken from an original karaoke recording of Frank Sinatra's The Way You Look Tonight
This clip is of the same recording of Frank Sinatra's The Way You Look Tonight which has been processed by the AI software
To create the system, researchers at Indiana University Bloomington used 4,702 amateur voice recordings from the online karaoke platform Smule to 'train' their AI algorithm to recognise and correction off-key notes.
The
