Jul 08, 2015 Today we're announcing a new project we've been working on at Vox Media: Autotune. We built this application to address the problem of reusability in our work. This project is open source.
NEW YORK – Michael D'Alessio, a White Plains developer who pleaded guilty to a federal charge of defrauding investors out of about $58 million, was sentenced Friday to six years in prison.
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D'Alessio, 53, once a successful developer who had an office on Water Street in White Plains, was arrested in August on a federal wire-fraud charge in connection with an alleged years-long scheme to defraud investors in luxury real estate development projects in Westchester County, Manhattan and the Hamptons.
D'Alessio promised investors that he would develop and build luxury homes and condominiums that would yield big returns, but when the real estate market took a downturn, he resorted to fraud, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman.
'In the end, all he built was a Ponzi scheme that he used to rip off his investors of their hard-earned life savings to the tune of $58 million,' Berman said in a statement. 'Others who would consider funding a life of luxury with the proceeds of fraud should take heed. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to see that such fraud is met with justice, and that those who would commit such crimes understand that crime doesn’t pay.”
In addition to the prison term, D'Alessio was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay forfeiture in the amount of $58 million.
In November, D'Alessio pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman to one count of committing wire fraud, as well as one count of concealing assets from a bankruptcy court.
The government recommended the court impose a sentence of 97 to 121 months in prison, along with $57.9 million in restitution, arguing that D'Alessio's criminal conduct was 'brazen, predatory and calculated to avoid detection,' according to Berman's sentencing memorandum.
'He victimized hundreds of people through outright lies, and he corrupted the bankruptcy proceeding (that he was forced into) with more lies when his Ponzi scheme fell apart,' he said.
D'Alessio's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, petitioned the court, saying that D'Alessio is a 'fundamentally decent man who unfortunately committed serious crimes' as he suffered from the 'vicious grip of a compulsive gambling disorder' that Brafman said was further intensified by D'Alessio's use of a prescription medication.
Brafman suggested to the court a sentence of 36 months — or three years — in prison followed by three years of supervised release would be 'sufficient, but not greater than necessary' to accomplish the goal of the sentencing.
The wire fraud charge carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense; and the charge of hiding assets from a bankruptcy court carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense.
Last year, nearly 20 investors, including some with ties to Westchester, filed several lawsuits in state Supreme Court against D'Alessio and Michael Paul Enterprises, as well as several other entities under D'Alessio's control, claiming that he and his companies lured investors into seven development projects by promising 9 to 16 percent annual returns.
And after receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of investments for a specific project, D'Alessio 'began siphoning the investor funds for personal use,' commingling funds earmarked for a certain project with his other projects, while misinforming investors about the projects' progress and their costs, according to the complaints.
The investors included Rella Fogliano and Joseph Breda with The MacQuesten Cos., a Pelham-based developer; Attis Properties of Harrison; and Stacey Gendels, Bonni Stanley and Marilyn Shendell, who are associated with Cornell Pace, a New Rochelle-based property-management and investment company.
Twitter: @AskAkiko
GUILTY PLEA: Michael D'Alessio, White Plains developer, faces prison
CHARGED: Feds arrest White Plains developer Michael D'Alessio for wire fraud
SUED: White Plains developer accused of siphoning millions from investors
CREDITORS: Banks seek to force White Plains developer into bankruptcy
CRAIG CARTON: New Rochelle native and former WFAN radio host, sentenced in ticket scam
Updated 4:27 AM EST Dec 11, 2019
It's rare that a performer can sing flawless vocals in one take. For proof, try listening to a live recording of your favorite band. Most likely, some of the vocals will all be a bit off -- maybe not by much, but just enough that they sound rough when compared to the studio version. Traditionally, studio engineers obtained clean, polished vocals on a song by making the artist record the vocals dozens of times -- then, they edited the best parts together. From Frank Sinatra to Tammi Wynette, laying down multiple vocal tracks in the studio was par for the course.
With Auto-Tune, engineers suddenly didn't need to rely on endless re-recordings to obtain perfect vocals. The singer's last note was a little flat? The engineer simply calls up the full performance on a computer screen and, using a mouse, digitally 'nudges' wrong notes into the right key.
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Engineers have been able to change the pitch of a singer's voice ever since magnetic tape was invented. All you have to do is record your voice onto a tape recorder and play it at a faster speed. The problem is, the trick leaves your voice with a high-pitched 'chipmunk' sound. The genius of Auto-Tune is that it can alter the pitch of your voice while still preserving its original quality of the overall recording. Using immense quantities of math, Auto-Tune is able to map out an image of your voice. Using that data, it can then tweak the pitch of your voice without doing too much damage to your voice's original tone and feeling.
The new program saved time and money, and, according to Hildebrand, it made for better music. Here's what Hildebrand told the Seattle Times in 2009:
'Before Auto-Tune, sound studios would spend a lot of time with singers, getting them on pitch and getting a good emotional performance. Now they just do the emotional performance, they don't worry about the pitch, the singer goes home, and they fix it in the mix' [source: Matson].
Within years, 95 percent of all Top 40 songs counted traces Auto-Tune in their production [source: Freeman]. Still, purists derided the software as 'cheating'; artists just weren't taking the time to record quality vocal tracks anymore. American singer-songwriter Neko Case summed it up in a 2006 interview: 'When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody's voice, I don't take them seriously' [source: Dombal].
Worse, Auto-Tune was also accused of filling pop music with attractive yet untalented singers. Only a few years before Cher's 'Believe,' the pop duo Milli-Vanilli had been charged with fraud after audiences discovered that the band's two members had actually been lip-syncing vocals performed by different musicians. Fearing a similar scandal, engineers took pains to disguise their vocal-correction footprints as much as possible.
Meanwhile, buried deep in the software was a setting known as the 'zero function.' One of the ways Auto-Tune makes its pitch-corrections sound natural is by putting small spaces of time in between notes. Just like a real human voice, the software will take a few milliseconds to gently ease from one note to the next. But Auto-Tune came with the option to reducing the space between notes to zero, thereby forcing the notes to change instantaneously from one to the other, giving the vocal track an eerie, computerized timbre.
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It was like using Photoshop to dial up a picture to 100 percent brightness. Sure, you could do it, but it would turn your image into a washed-out mess. Similarly, engaging the zero function would transform your vocal track into a clutter of warbly, sci-fi sounds. Surely, the engineers thought at Antares, nobody would ever need to use the zero function. Right?