In a bit of a rush so will not reply in detail now but some quick points.
Do you really believe that there were many people walking around knowledgeable of Malachi's vibrato on their own?
No. But I am not sure why that matters?
see Vision. fans didn't protest the album? remember the campaign to change the tracklist as well as the fan sites coming together and declaring a position? I don't know what you call "massive" but the protests did start pretty quickly.
These protests only started after Breaking News was streamed though. You said that MJ fans jump to conclusions based on tabloid rumours, such as with the Glee/Monster/Paris Hilton issue. If what you said is true, fans should have started protesting the 'Michael' album as soon as those rumours about fake tracks appeared (before BN was streamed). That did not happen. My point was that the situation is different now, because fans lost a lot of faith in the Estate exactly because of the 'Michael' debacle.
I agree that 140 character limit on twitter makes it hard to communicate and not always everything is understood correctly. For example I agree with kreen when he said we have no idea whether Teddy understood the questions about the issues with vibrato. The answer he gave (melodyne) is a common complaint in regards to processing - go search gearslutz for melodyne and vibrato and you'll see that musicians write that it sounds unnatural and so on. So doubters stating Teddy's answer does not explain the issue at hand is kinda flawed when they don't know if he actually understood the issue to start with. Similarly heat of the moment can affect wording choices, for example Teddy Riley who was being attacked and cursed by fans is more likely to have a defensive mood and use similar curses and attacks than a statement coming from the estate being written by legal department and probably read over by multiple parties before being sent out.
But Teddy actually made the point about Melodyne in an interview with Reuters, so he had more than enough time to think it over. Kreen mistakenly thought that Teddy said that on Twitter (I posted the link to the original article a couple of pages back and Stella later posted the video of it.)
As has been explained several times, pitch-correcting notes with Melodyne would not cause this type of vibrato. The idea that Teddy did not understand the issue seems strange to me. He brings up the vibrato himself and the shakiness of the vibrato is what everybody was focusing on at that time (including Taryll, who called it a 'dead give-away'). This is also the only thing that jumps out about the vibrato, so I am not sure what else he would be thinking of. And in the video you can even see that he is shaking his hand when he says 'the vibrato is a little..', as if to indicate that it is shaky.
However the content is valued the same. For example Taryll said it's not Michael and he knows his uncles voice on twitter. Estate said it's Michael as their researched showed it. No one gave Estate's statement more weight because it came on a sheet of paper.
I disagree, I think many people did and do.
yeah my comment was about immediate opinions such as people declaring it was Malachi and I don't think it's normal. For example do you think meeting a person for the first time ever and in 2 minutes declaring she'll be the one you'll spend your life forever normal? I don't. I similarly don't consider 1 minute into the song making declarations normal either.
I don't think you can compare identifying your favourite singer on a piece of music to complex decisions such as determining whether someone will be your lifelong partner or not. However, if I tell you I will play you a tape of a cow mooing and when I play it, you hear a cat meowing, does it take you more than a minute to realize it is not a cow? I'm obviously exaggerating here, but for some of us the difference between MJ's voice and the Cascio singer's voice
is like night and day. And that is exactly what those initial responses reflect.
And with regards to quick judgements, research has shown that people can actually be surprisingly good in making quick decisions, even about something as complicated as people's personalities. When people are shown short (literally a few seconds) video clips without sound of a teacher and asked to provide ratings about this teacher's skills and personality, these ratings correlate surprisingly highly with the ratings given by the actual students in this teacher's class.
For some people I think it's impossible to change their opinions regardless of what is put in front of them given the emotional investment in the topic.
I think so too, but you probably think this mainly applies to doubters whereas I think this applies more to believers.
As I said, I think many believers completely disregard or downplay any of the issues we raise.
For example assume tomorrow you are given an expert report that's 100 pages that shows all of the tests that are done by the non arguably best experts in the world and assume the reports says 80% and 85% Michael (remember in this instance there's no perfect proof). What will be your opinion then? Would you believe the expert report and say you were wrong or still continue to have the same opinion and believe each expert was wrong and it was the 10-15% error rate?
This would depend on much more than just the fact that some experts concluded it or just the fact that there is always a chance for a false positive. I would want to read exactly how the analysis was conducted. If I felt like this was all done appropriately, then yes, I might adjust my opinion. Given the error rate I would not hinge my opinion on just this, but it would obviously be a big factor in how I felt about the songs. I believe in these methods. That is also why I believe a proper analysis would never ever show that it was Michael on those songs.
somehow and some way. see that's not good enough for me.
Obviously I would prefer more answers as well.
On the flip side: is it good enough for you that there is no evidence that Michael ever recorded any of these songs?
I think the point that the doubters are missing that the vocals do not sound "not like MJ at all" to the believers. To them it doesn't sound off so you are expecting them to address something they do not believe in at all. That's not gonna happen and it's not a disregard or a shift of focus.
Yes, there are some believers who really think the vocals do not sound off. But many believers also think that something sounds strange about them. Why else would we have heard so many explanations for why Michael sounds different such as the fact that they were guide vocals, that his voice has changed over the years and was not as strong anymore, that it is processing, etc. These are all things that have also been mentioned repeatedly in this topic. And I have never seen a believer give a head-on response to the questions about and criticism of these explanations.
and as for the initial reactions read the first part. I don't think people made them "relatively independent" of one another. I actually think there was quite a lot of idea sharing and help from the others. Just see the two posts above in which people say that they weren't knowledgeable about Malachi so there's nothing "independent" about their opinion, to the contrary their opinion is pretty much shaped by the "help" and opinions of others.
People were obviously 'helped' by the opinions of others later on. I was talking about the very first reactions to the song as it was first streamed, when many many people at the same time were posting their responses on this forum and others.
Okay, this still turned into another extremely long post. :lol: Really gotta run now!
