>>3535201I listen to a ton of modern pop and almost never notice a pitch snapping from note to note unless it's very clearly a stylistic thing, even from the pop acts no one but me and 20 other people still follow in 2021 like Capital Cities and St. Lucia and Neon Trees. These guys can't be called major releases these days but their production is consistently top tier and free of any super harsh artifacting. Go listen to Nights - I Can Feel you Forgetting Me. It has it's sub 150K views after 9 months and had zero advertisement upon release. It definitely uses autotune and heavy chorus effects and it's 10X cleaner sounding than Spiral Tones. What baffles me isn't really the idea that japanese idol pop so heavily utilized autotune, it's that it's consistently not well done. I'm trying to find the root cause of it not being well done and I think it's a combination of bad tools and the mixers barely knowing how to use what they have. There's a thing about japanese media production where it's more about "getting it out there" than "making it perfect." I know that sounds like the antithesis of japanese autism but it's only in their media production circuit, everything else they're autistic about. Hell digital media production of this sort is still relatively new in japan. Despite pioneering so much of modern technology, the japanese are remarkably slow to adopt even their own stuff, and American mixing tools have long since outpaced the japanese software market. I think they literally do not have the software needed to create proper autotuning, and they're probably too stubborn to learn even if they could. This is also probably why the "japanese idol pop music sound" is the way that it is. Aside from the absolute most autistic they're probably producing most of the music in their basement with unequalized bass heavy headphones. Try listening to any hololive song with a flat equalized pair of headphones, then try listening to them on WH1000XM4s with no adjustments. These songs are mixed by and for people who are not audio autists, and again, only the most autistic of the most autistic of the japanese even know about this stuff. They're still trying to grasp the concept of Bluetooth headphones, let alone software equalization. Seriously, get any standard pair of bass heavy consumer headphones and play a hololive song with them, there is a small amount of actual bass. Now turn on reference4 or PeaceEQ with an equalization curve for your pair of headphones and listen again, there's almost no bass with a proper flat curve. It's fucked up, despite the market not being normies these songs are mixed for the normie market because the japanese normies are behind the western ones and still use normie tech. Hololive songs sound fucking horrible on my K240s through a proper dac/amp, but they sound fine on my $30 bluetooth skullcandy set. I'm getting fuckinged up thinkin about it all.
