What is Pitch Shifting?
Also called: transposing, key change
Pitch shifting is changing the pitch of audio up or down without changing its tempo. It is measured in semitones, with 12 semitones in an octave, and in cents for fine tuning, with 100 cents in a semitone.
Singers use it to move a backing track into a key that suits their voice; producers use it to fit samples to a song's key; DJs use key lock to keep a track's pitch steady while they change its speed.
Small shifts of one or two semitones usually sound natural. Larger shifts can make voices sound unnatural, because the formants, the resonances that give a voice its character, move along with the pitch. Some processors can keep the formants in place to avoid that.
Shifting a recording by changing its playback speed, like speeding up a record, changes pitch and tempo together; pitch shifting separates them.
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Change Pitch and Tempo