If Alicia Keys’s voice cracks at the Super Bowl, but it’s edited out, did it even happen?

It’s a momentary glitch that singers everywhere fear: the dreaded voice crack.

So when Alicia Keys belted out the opening notes to her iconic anthem If I Ain’t Got You during Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show — and warbled, ever so slightly, before recovering — it was a vulnerable, but for many, relatable moment about the realities of live performances.

But if you watch the NFL’s official YouTube video or Apple Music‘s video of the same performance, the crack never happened.

“No hate to Alicia Keys, but I remember that voice cracking last night,” one TikTok user said in a video with 9.5 million views.

The NFL video, viewed over 17 million times on YouTube as of Wednesday afternoon, was seemingly edited to smooth out the note. And that divided a lot of people online, with some saying the NFL showed Keys grace by editing out the mistake, and others saying it’s the mistake that makes her performance real.

“Cracking happens, because artists are humans,” a vocal coach said in a TikTok video, just one of many on the platform who defended Keys.

But what concerned Robert Komaniecki, a music theory and music history lecturer at the University of British Columbia, wasn’t just this specific example of vocal editing, but how easy it has become to revise the official record of a live event.

This sort of edit is simple, he said, and probably took less than five minutes to do, whether they used pre-recorded rehearsal audio, or an editing software that can smooth out glitches and tuning.

“I think some people are a little bit freaked out by that. That millions and millions of people can witness something happen, and then the official record will just carry no evidence that it happened, and there will be no acknowledgement that it changed,” Komaniecki told CBC News.

The NFL has not publicly addressed the seeming edit. CBC News has reached out for comment.

Keys hasn’t addressed it yet, either, although in a video posted on X just before the performance, she did comment on how “chilly” it was in Las Vegas.

On Instagram, her husband, record producer and rapper Swizz Beatz, praised her performance, writing, “Y’all talking about the wrong damn thing!!! … Tonight’s performance was nothing but amazing.”

Altering live performances the norm?

It’s common for little flaws to be buffed out of live performances when they’re uploaded or turned into albums — audience noises are turned down; cheering is turned up; swear words are edited out by the tech crew. 

And live performances often aren’t all that live at all, especially when it comes to the U.S. national anthem, arguably one of the most difficult songs to sing. In fact, some of the most memorable “live” performances of the U.S. anthem in history were pre-recorded.

The version of Whitney Houston’s iconic rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner at the 1991 Super Bowl heard on television was lip-synced, according to her producer. While she did sing live on the field, the audio used in broadcast was pre-recorded, Rickey Minor, Houston’s longtime music director, told Today.

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Beyoncé lip-synced The Star-Spangled Banner at former U.S. president Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, the singer admitted.

“Due to no proper sound check, I did not feel comfortable taking a risk. It was about the president and the inauguration, and I wanted to make him and my country proud, so I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track,” she said in a news conference leading up to that year’s Super Bowl.

And these days, there’s technology that allows for live vocal performances to be tuned, Komaniecki said.

“It’s kind of a fallacy to think of live performances as a pure representation of what an artist can do, unaided, because they have all sorts of help.”

The Super Bowl’s super audience

But while Keys’s live performance may not have been the first to be altered, it may be the most viewed: Sunday’s Super Bowl was the most watched program in U.S. television history. According to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, the game averaged 123.4 million viewers across television and streaming platforms.

The Super Bowl also drew its biggest audience in Canada, with an average audience of 10 million viewers on TSN, CTV and RDS, preliminary data from Numeris confirmed.

And viewership peaked at 12.6 million during the halftime show, featuring R&B superstar Usher — and Keys.

As pop-culture publication the AV Club points out, it’s possible her performance was edited because the halftime show is now sponsored by Apple Music.  

The streaming service became the sponsor for the show in 2022, replacing Pepsi, which had held the position for a decade. Since then, the streaming service has been pushing to leave an influential mark like never before.

“We’re trying to extend the campaign to more than just a show on a Sunday afternoon,” Oliver Schusser, the vice-president of Apple Music and president of Beats, said at a news conference last Friday.

The live performance available to subscribers of Apple Music also appears to edit out Keys’s voice cracking.

CBC News has also reached out to Apple for comment.

Super Bowl gaffes

While the seeming edit of Keys’s performance is the talk of social media, it ranks low in terms of controversy — Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction with Justin Timberlake that exposed her breast was perhaps the most memorable. 

In Keys’s case, even assuming the best intentions of the NFL and Apple Music, Komaniecki said a vocal crack in a live performance shouldn’t make anyone ashamed.

“If anything, when I heard that, I was almost a little bit excited, like, ‘Oh, these mics really are on; this is an actual live performance,'” he said.

“It made me admire her as an artist even more.”