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This singer's videos were doing the rounds recently and have got some mainstream media coverage (1, 2) and I'm intrigued to know how the effect is achieved. It sounds a little like the voice 'breaking' effect used in yodeling, Irish music and country singing, but I've never heard that controlled to such small intervals.

How is this achieved and is it something that would be possible for most singers to learn?

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    Eat your heart out Cher! It does sound just like autotune. Are you sure it's not?
    – Tim
    Jan 14, 2017 at 10:13
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    @Tim I'm not at all sure - but if it's a hoax I don't believe it has been rumbled yet! Jan 14, 2017 at 10:16
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    Life imitating art - sort of. I loathe auto-tune when used like that anyway, now someone's actually learned how to sound like that without AT... what is the world coming to? ;)
    – Tetsujin
    Jan 14, 2017 at 11:49
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    If I were going to fake it, I'd record the vocals (very dry), process them, play back the vocals while playing the piano and lip-synching -- that way the records sounds like everything is in the same room. But it seems that it is not a fake youtube.com/watch?v=Fojqf0TXpW8
    – Dave
    Jan 14, 2017 at 15:59
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    @Tim it doesn't matter whether the piano is in tune – autotune† is monophonic, so if it tracks&quantises the voice then any piano on the same track will at each point in time be pitch-shifted by the same amount as whatever is required to move the voice to an exact 12-edo pitch. As a result, the piano would then not be in tune after all. (Besides, piano is never perfect in tune anyway, but that's a different story...) Jan 15, 2017 at 0:24

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I don't think it's auto tune, because as @leftroundabout says, the piano would bend out of tune too.

One comment on Youtube mentioned Sideways Yodelling, which is basically like what happens when (if you're male) you're going through puberty and your voice breaks.

It can be used to make some very cool sounds. Here's a tutorial on how it's done (from 2008, which is well after autotune was being used to fix out-of-tune singing, but before the trend of over-using auto-tune as a vocal effect):

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