I’m not talking about the mid-atlantic accent which has been asked about on this sub. I mean how the actual recordings of voices have a distinct sound quality where you can tell they’re…. old timey. Not the graininess, not background-noisiness, but the actual timbre/character of the voices has some sort of… idk, almost slightly electronicky sound to it. And modern artists use it as an artificial effect. But modern recording technology recreates voices much more true-to-life. What is this?
If this makes no sense feel free to roast me and remove my post >_>
edit: someone suggested to link an example. This was on my mind when watching this clip of the Jordannaires singing at the Grand Ol Opry in the 50s: [https://youtu.be/qkJU8BS-jDU?t=337](https://youtu.be/qkJU8BS-jDU?t=337) I listen to a fair amount of barbershop, and lots of the old recordings have this vocal quality to it, but modern recordings are much more accurate to the person’s real-life voice.
In: Technology
David Byrne talks about this in one of this books. It’s been a few years since I read it, but the gist is, RCA wanted to advertise that their record players sounded indistinguishable from the human voice, while obviously record players of the time were severely band-limited. So for the demos they had famous jazz singers sing intentionally with a nasally voice that was reproduceable on record. As a result, this style of singing took off. Also, it became natural to imitate the sound of your favorite singer, which you’d only heard on record, so you’d naturally also copy the lo-fi affectations of the recording medium.
TL;DR singers imitated the sound of recorded voices.
But in that example you showed, they’re just lip syncing to their record which is dusty and warped in addition to being distorted and bandlimited.
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