Is It Live ... or Yamaha? Channeling Glenn Gould

New York Times ^ | March 12, 2007 | Edward Rothstein

[billorites]

Was that relief I felt as the piano was playing? A feeling that some worry had been alleviated or a fear quieted? Why then was it also mixed with disappointment, as if some deep yearning had been thwarted? Not yet, not yet, not yet: relief and frustration intertwined.

For months I had deliberately avoided listening. A technologically oriented, musically sophisticated company, Zenph Studios (zenph.com), claimed that it could bring the voices of the musical dead back to life. It could achieve, that is, what technology has long dreamt of: It would make light of the material world and all its restrictions.

Zenph claimed it could take a 50-year-old mono recording and distill from its hiss-laden, squished sound all of the musical information that originally went into it. It wouldn’t “process” the recording to get rid of noise; it wouldn’t pretend to turn mono into stereo; it wouldn’t try to correct things that were sonically “wrong.” Instead the claim was that it would, using its proprietary software, learn from recorded sound precisely how an instrument — a piano, for starters — was played, with what force a key was struck, how far down the sustain pedal was pressed, when each finger moved, how each note was weighted in a complex chord and what sort of timbre was actually produced.

Then it would effectively recreate the instrument. A digital file encoded with this information would be read by Yamaha’s advanced Disklavier Pro — a computerized player piano — and transformed into music. A recorded piano becomes a played piano. This would be sonic teleportation, monochromatic forms reincarnated as three-dimensional sound — not colorization but re-creation.

Zenph also announced it had accomplished this feat of technological legerdemain with one of the most remarkable recordings of the last century: Glenn Gould’s 1955 mono rendition

[Borges]

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[sitetest]

Very interesting article.

It produces mixed feelings.

[MinuteGal]

I listen to FM classical music whenever I can.....and have been doing so all my adult life.

I swear I heard about this technique many, many years ago.....maybe not with all the digital stuff, but music recreated and recorded as it was played by famous pianists/composers even going back to Chopin and Liszt.,,,complete with the approximate finger pressures, etc.

Am I dreaming this?

Leni

[billorites]

I love technology.

I love Glenn Gould.

Yamahas creep me out a little, though.

[mozarky2]

I once read a review of some Bernstein recorded by the Labecque sisters-the reviewer said the "hyperbright" Yamaha took to the ears like razor blades!

[mozarky2]

I have a recording of some Mozart sonatas that was recorded with the soloist (Phillipe Entremont) in Paris and the piano in New York!

[billorites]

"Bernstein recorded by the Labecque sisters"

The Labecque sisters have long loomed large in my fantasia for four hands.

[Socratic]

I don't know how far back the reproducing player piano goes but my piano teacher had three reproducing baby grands. She had a Duo-Art, Welte-Mignon and Ampico. There were extra holes in the player piano rolls that encoded such things as finger pressure, attack and subtle pedaling. I heard some recordings by Gershwin and it was as though he were sitting on the bench and really making those keys fly up and down. It was amazing!

[MinuteGal]

I THOUGHT I had heard about some reproduction attempts many years ago. I never knew if the attempts were genuine or just experiments or maybe even hoaxes to sell records. Then it went out of my mind till this article was posted......but the subject still interests me.

Thanks for your input.

Leni

[ADemocratNoMore]

I've has this idea for many years now, alas I am not a programmer and the few people I mentioned it to just look at me kinda glassy-eyed so I've filed it away in the might have been bin for the time being. My concept is to use the musical information found in a recording as control signals for virtual instruments.

As far as >"music recreated and recorded as it was played by famous pianists/composers even going back to Chopin and Liszt", have you ever heard of Rosemary Brown?. I have read one of her books, it does give one pause.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Brown_(spiritualist)

[MinuteGal]

Fascinating stuff, indeed.

Someone channeled "Chopsticks" to me as a kid and it's haunted me ever since.

Leni