[lit-ideas] Reproduced music
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 07:46:22 EDT
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1517&e=10&u=/afp/afplifestylem
usic
Okay, this is just ...weird.....
<<Ghost concert to revive music of the past
Wed Apr 20, 2:52 PM ET
PARIS (AFP) - Music lovers in North Carolina are due for a strange treat
next month.
They will hear two piano virtuosi in concert... but both musicians are long
dead.
The music will be played on a grand piano that has been specially programmed
to give a note-perfect, live rendition of ancient recordings made by Alfred
Cortot in 1928 and Glenn Gould in 1962.
"The piano will replicate every note struck, down to the velocity of the
hammer and position of the key when it was played," the British weekly
magazine
New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.
The key to the phantom concert lies in the transcription of the scratchy
recordings into a high-resolution version of MIDI, the standard format for
encoding music for computers.
The usual problem with MIDI transcription is polyphony -- distinguishing
several notes that are played simultaneously.
Attempts to transcribe polyphonic notes are typically only 80 percent
successful, says New Scientist. About 10 percent of polyphonic notes are
missing
and another 10 percent are mistranscribed, which can give the replicated music
a
hollowness or discordance.
Zenph Studios, a software company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, claims
that it has found a solution to the problem, although it refuses to say how
for commercial reasons.
It has successfully tried out the Cortot and Gould pieces on the Disklavier
Pro, one of only a few concert grand pianos that can record and play back
high-definition MIDI files.
A concert will be held in Raleigh next month in which Corto -- dead since
1962 -- will "play" a Chopin prelude, while Gould, in his grave since 1982,
will "perform" Bach's 'Goldberg Variations'.
By faithfully transcribing the notes and reproducing them exactly as they
were played at the time, the technique could haul out of the archives
innumerable sound recordings that have never been released because of flaws
such as
background noise.
Zenph's next project is to clean up a recording made at a private party by
by the jazz giant Art Tatum two years before his death in 1956, the report
says. >>
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