Taylor Swift has broken records with her Eras Tour which officially concludes next month, but one vocal analyst appears to have proven that she is not singing and performing her songs live.
In a YouTube video he published this week to his 434,000 subscribers, prominent vocal analyst “Wings of Pegasus” proved with objective audio analysis that Taylor Swift lip-synchs – or mimes – during the Eras Tour.
“You can hear that across all of these shows, [her vocals] are perfectly in sync,” he said. “Her vocal is starting at the exact same time, finishing at the exact same time.”
This, as he points out, is not physically possible for a human to do.
“If we get vocal lines that match each other… It can’t happen,” he said. “Even with a clear vocal of a singer, doing one performance and even just singing a few notes and singing a few notes again, those vocal lines will not overlap, in terms of the detail – your hundredths of a second of your vocal cord vibrations.”
“It’s impossible to sing over your vocal lines that you’ve just done – it very much is like a fingerprint,” he concluded.
He pointed out that even the air hitting the mic – which he calls a “plosive” – is exactly the same from show to show.
He then used pitch detection software to compare the pitches of two of her performances. With this software, he was able to show visually how the pitch and timing are exactly the same from show to show – something that would be physically impossible for a human being singing the songs live.
“This shouldn’t overlap at all,” he said. “It shouldn’t be anywhere close. But then when we line up the pitch, we see that it is a perfect replication.
“That is something that is simply impossible to do with human vocal cords – to sing to that detail,” he continued. “We’re looking at hundredths of a second here and [there is] a pitch variation of zero cents.”
“So, this is the same audio file,” he concluded.
He then did the same analysis with two more shows and concluded the same thing.
Wings of Pegasus points out that this is even more striking when you consider the fact that there is very different ambient crowd noise behind the vocal performances which should make the files appear different. But still, the pitch detection software proves that this is a pre-recorded audio file that is then played for Taylor to lip-sync over at her shows.
“And just to clarify, when I say that it’s the same audio, I mean the same audio file,” he explains. “It’s the same audio that’s been recorded in the studio to sound live – because it’s got the plosives left on there – but it’s that same audio that’s being mimed to. It is one vocal that’s been pre-recorded before all of these performances that Taylor is then miming to.”
And more than that, he asserts that the pre-recorded track isn’t exactly “live,” either. Even the pre-recorded live performance has been heavily pitch-corrected to the point that he describes it as “borderline autotuned.”
“Something that I will say about the live performance and this vocal is that it is heavily edited from a pitch perspective,” he said. “I mean, it is borderline autotuned – it might be autotuned – because it is so stuck on these lines.”
“This is a pre-recorded vocal that has been heavily pitch-corrected, borderline autotuned,” he concluded.
“That is fact,” he said of his conclusion. “This is objective data that we are looking at. It’s undeniable.”
Earlier this year, Dave Grohl – the lead singer of the band “The Foo Fighters” – caught a lot of attention for insinuating that Swift did not sing and perform her songs live. But it sounds like he might have been onto something.
