Notable exceptions to this trend include Bruce Springsteen's hit " Streets of Philadelphia", which only uses the instruments as a backing track while the vocals were recorded with a microphone attached on the singer, giving a different feel to it. Similarly, some artists have been known to lip-sync backwards for music videos such that, when reversed, the singer is seen to sing forwards while time appears to move backwards in his or her surroundings, such as in Coldplay’s The Scientist. Artists also sometimes move their lips at a faster speed than the recorded track, to create videos with a slow-motion effect in the final clip, which is widely considered to be complex to achieve. Some artists lip sync because they are not confident singing live and want to avoid singing out of tune.īecause the film track and music track are recorded separately during the creation of a music video, artists usually lip-sync their songs and often imitate playing musical instruments as well. Sometimes lip sync performances are forced on performers by television producers to shorten the guest appearances of celebrities, as it requires less time for rehearsals and hugely simplifies the process of sound mixing, or to eliminate the risk of vocal errors.
It can be used to make it appear as though actors have substantial singing ability (e.g., The Partridge Family television show), to simulate a vocal effect that can be achieved only in the recording studio (e.g., Cher's Believe, which used an Auto-Tune effects processing on her voice) to improve performance during choreographed live dance numbers that incorporate vocals to misattribute vocals entirely (e.g., Milli Vanilli, a band which lip-synced to recordings made by other singers), or to cover deficiencies in live performance. The term sync or synch is pronounced / s ɪ ŋ k/, the same as the word sink. Lip sync is also referred to as lip-sync or lip-synch.