It might have been one of the biggest hits of 2024but the vocals on Billie Eilish’s Birds Of A Feather are consistently out of tune in comparison to the rest of the arrangement, says musician and YouTuber Noah Forbes (AKA Nojah).
In a recent video, Forbes begins by saying that, although he thinks the song is “brilliant”, there’s always been one thing that stands out for him when he listens to it – “that Billie’s vocals are very noticeably sharp”.
To prove his point, Forbes calls up an instance of Melodyne with Eilish’s Birds Of A Feather vocal loaded into it. This illustrates that, yes, her performance is consistently above the song’s key centre (it’s written in D major) – an average of 38 cents above, in fact (that’s 38 100ths of a semitone).
So what’s going on? “I promise this is not going to be a ‘Billie Eilish can’t sing’ video,” says Forbes, “because it goes without saying that Billie Eilish is a phenomenal singer and songwriter.”
That said, Forbes does have a theory: that the instrumental production on Birds Of A Feather is what caused Eilish to sing slightly sharp, and also why most listeners don’t really notice it.
“The song is very minimal and also tonally vague,” argues Forbes. “Most of the harmonic structure comes from soft low-end synths and basses that don’t offer as much of a tonal anchor for the listener to grab onto compared to instruments like piano and guitar.”
As a result, the pitch clash between backing track and vocals doesn’t sound so jarring, and this lack of tonal definition could explain why the vocal was recorded ‘sharp’ in the first place.
So, while we’ve seen others theorise on Reddit that the off-key vocal could have been a conscious production choice, Forbes is of the opinion that it was accidental, and not off-putting enough to be worth worrying about.
“I think that what happened is that while recording the song, Billie’s internal key centre drifted due to the ambiguous nature of the production and the instrumentation and no one noticed. Or perhaps more accurately, no one cared.”
Sounds plausible to us, though now that the tuning discrepancy has been pointed out to us, we think we’ll struggle to un-hear it.
