Wednesday, April 20, 2011

A 2006 live recording of Glenn Gould?

[Repeated entry from 17 August 2007] Sony Music recently released a new recording (made in 2006) of Glenn Gould performing the Goldberg Variations. Curious, not? The recording was made using measurements of the old recordings and then regenerating the performance on a computer-controlled grand piano, a modern pianola.

This technology dates from the early nineties, a time when several piano companies (including Yamaha and Bösendorfer) combined MIDI and modern solenoid technology with the older idea of a pianola. Old paper piano rolls with recordings of Rachmaninoff, Bartok, Stravinsky and others were translated to MIDI and could be reproduced ‘live’ on modern instruments like the Yamaha Disklavier. Until now, the only left challenge was to be able to do this for recordings of which no piano-rolls were available.

Besides the technicalities of all this, for most people the real surprise —or perhaps disillusion— might well be the realization that a piano performance can be reduced to the ‘when’, ‘what’ and ‘how fast’ the piano keys are pressed. Three numbers per note can fully capture a piano performance, and it allows for replicating any performance on a grand piano(-la). The moment a pianist hits the key with a certain velocity, the hammer releases, and any gesture that is made after that can be considered merely dramatic: it will have no effect on the sound. This realization puts all theories about the magic of touchĂ© in a different perspective.

Nevertheless, while it is relatively easy to make the translation from audio (say a recording from Glenn Gould from 1955) to the what (which notes), and the when (timing) in a MIDI-like representation, the problem is in the ‘reverse engineering’ of key velocity. What was the speed of Gould’s finger presses on the specific piano he used? The Zenph Studios claim to have solved it for at least a few recordings. Only trust your ears :-)

See also last weeks column on Radio 4 (in Dutch):



(see also earlier comments)

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Thursday, April 07, 2011

Familiar with popmusic?

This week a short entry to promote a PopQuiz made by MSc student Tom Aizenberg to understand more about music and memory. Feel free to share it with your Facebook friends...

Click here to do the listening test (just 10 questions).

Friday, April 01, 2011

Can music be funny?

In the spirit of today a fragment from New Horizons in Music Appreciation, a program from Radio Station WOOF at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople: an early example of how to attract a wider audience to listen to classical music:



With regard to today's question: David Huron (2004) studied audience laughter in live recordings of Peter Schickele's music (One of the presenters in the broadcast above). In that paper he offers a physiological explanation for why listeners respond to specific musical fragments by producing the distinctive "ha-ha-ha" vocalization....

ResearchBlogging.org Huron, D. (2004). Music-engendered laughter: an analysis of humor devices in P.D.Q. Bach Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition, 700-704.