Amid continuing accusations that Beyonce lip-synched her performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony on Monday, now Alicia Keys and a sound production website have stepped into the fray.
Keys defended Beyonce at a recent interview to promote her new album Girl on Fire with UK radio station Capital FM .
Speaking about the now three-day row, Keys said :
“What I do know is that Beyonce is a great performer and she’s an incredible artist with a really, really powerful voice. The one thing that you cannot doubt is that she can sing. She absolutely can sing.”
“All the rest of the ‘whys’ or ‘whatever’, we know that she can deliver and she did deliver that song really beautifully.”
To watch Capital FM’s Keys interview click here .
Meanwhile, NME reports that a “leading” sound production website has said Beyonce’s rendition of national anthem was not lip-synched — but live.
In their blog post, ProductionAdvice.co.uk detail three key reasons why they believe this.
The site writes:
“When she starts singing, her voice is hard to hear – the microphone gain is too low. The sound-man quickly corrects this – but if we were listening to a recording this wouldn’t happen.”
The post goes on to describe a phenomena known as “proximity effect” — which is an increase in bass or low frequency response when a sound source (e.g a singer) is close to a microphone — as being clearly evident.
The site also said that when Beyonce smiled during her performance the sound of her voice changed along with the shape of her mouth.
Question is, will it satisfy the doubters?
Not least among them the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin, who told ABC News that she thought Beyonce “did a beautiful job” at the ceremony, adding that she “cracked up” laughing when she heard about the furor.
To recap, 24 hours after Beyonce’s performance, a member of the Marine Corps Band — Master Sgt Kristin DuBois — told The Times of London that the singer decided to use a pre-recording at the last minute.
Cue a resulting media pile-on and a subsequent statement by Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Gregory Wolf, who said :
“Regarding Ms Knowles-Carter’s vocal performance, no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded.”
As yet, Beyoncé has said nothing about the controversy and multiple media requests to her reps for comment have met with no response.
Perhaps now that more voices have come forward to defend her, she’ll finally speak.
