Slashdot Mirror
First Virtual Piano Competition
bluegreenone writes: "The New York Times has an article on what may be the first 'virtual' piano competition. One of the judges for the contest being held in St. Paul will actually be in Japan. He will evaluate the performances as relayed by Yamaha's Disklavier system. This has some interest from a technical standpoint, and also raises new questions about what a "live" performance is."
Well, a live performance isn't that for sure. Whatever this judge think he's judging, it isn't the performance of the artist.
Now this would not be true for, say, a synthesiser performance. There the whole thing can accurately be digitally reproduced. But for piano? Forget it.
Cheers,
Ian
(Keyboard player, and to some extent pianist too)
Has anyone ever questioned whether a "live" broadcast is live? I thought the difference between live and non live was the venue, live is all performed in front of an audience with no retries, non live is studio recorded material with editing/mastering etc inbetween the performance/performances and the final recording.
I'll admit I simplified it a lot, but I don't see how this stands to change the definition of live.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
The Disklavier system is pretty remarkable. Modern classic composer Sakamoto Ryuichi uses one in his live performances and it really enhances the show. It allows him to focus one one part of the music while the piano can play accompanying notes in the background.
Very cool technology.
I have been pwned because my
of a contest.
Eventually all judge should not only be far away from the actual performance but also be anaware who is playing.
The music community is too corrupt.
ok taken from the article
But it will not be exactly the same time. It takes roughly 30 minutes to transmit and download a performance over the Internet.
asumming that it even does get the pedal work just right, which the article does not leave a really strong impression of...
what the heck do the pianists and crowd do for the 30 minute download, and the following minutes listening period (no way he will be judging on a stream, lol i could just see his face when it starts hittin traffic and buffering)...
they gonna all start having tea and crumpets while waiting for this guy on another continent to be able to score?
it does sound like really neat technology, and surely has it's uses, but is this really one of the better uses?
There are, however, in existence a large number of piano rolls from the late 19th/early 20th century recorded directly by famous pianists or composers of the time. Debussy did quite a few.
These work rather differently from a digital system. For a start, there's no quantisation so minute variations in time are picked up by the system. It also does a pretty good job on a wide range on dynamics.
This means that you can actually hear Debussy playing some of his more famous compositions even though he's dead.
The Day Today - Game Warden to the Events Rhino
There's a site here.
It's sponsored by Yamaha so it's gotta alota maketroid stuff. CBC radio has been keeping pretty good tabs on the competition. I think it's a little too borgish. This bar of music by 7 of 8.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
If you think this a live performance, wouldn't a simple recording of a someone playing be live then too by your definition. Now the synthisizer is doing it real-time instead of later. Wouldn't the old player pianos(the ones that played music on their own, just change the sheets) be live, wouldn't a wind up ballerina be live? Whatever.
You could write such a fancy article about Eurovision Song Contest as well, in which people from 24. different countries interactively select the best of the terrible songs -during the live broadcast-. For example in Finland, you could vote by sending a SMS. But now, that would not be as cool, as a "virtual piano contest". :)
As a proud Yamaha Disklavier owner (the MPX1), I can tell you that the action is unnoticably different from a normal piano. All the pickups are laser based, and not suction. As for midi not being sufficient? Bah! It captures the velocity of my playing to a tee. Even the pedal has 127 different levels of "on". When I record something I play, and replay it, there is absolutely 0 perceptable difference in the resulting sound.
I remember that at least four years back, they held a very similar competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland (of course, sponsored by Yamaha).
During the festival, you could enter the competition by playing an original composition or a known piece on one of the Disklaviers they had standing in the lobby of the main festival hall.
Your performance would be recorded on a disk and later, all entries were judged by a jury that heard the pieces being reproduced by a Disklavier.
So that technology is far from new, really. It's just once more that Yamaha is promoting their Disklavier.
...let's see you try that with (say) a trumpet. Or, even worse, a violin (or any bowed instrument) or EVEN worse, with the electric guitar where each virtuoso tries new ways to produce sounds off of it (two words: Makita Cordless. Yeah, that's an extreme example.).
This VirtualClavier is just some way to show off r&d for something that needs not r&d (at least that's my opinion, i know it sounds very short-sighted...) (others have done various similar stuff).
live performance is just when the performer is using the instrument *now* to produce sound. This thing is not. This, might be a live performance, but not a live performance of a piano. It is a live performance of a VirtualClavier (wasn't midi fully capable of emulating the piano? what's this for!?)
I salute them for their "silent" series. Not eletric not acoustic, yet electric and acoustic...
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
I thought this was about force feedback hand/foot devices (keys and pedals do not qualify)
A good performer is going to adapt to that, consciously or not, and his/her play style is going to subtly change to accentuate those quirks that enhance the overall sound of the composition and downplay those that intefere. These slight variations are not going to translate well to a whole different instrument even if you could transmit extremely accurate information, which the system almost certainly can't.
and also raises new questions about what a "live" performance is.
its still live..
Having played all my life, I can tell you that as with many people, watching on TV or remotely, or even being at a concert and haginv to watch on the big screen sucks compared to being in the first 5 rows. People have to see the live show up close and in person to really "be there".
sir_haxalot
stuff |
...in Player Piano, in 1955 or so. A recording, no matter how faithful, is a recording, it captures a performance, not a performer. The Disklavier is a player piano, a really good one. It makes the hammers hit the strings in (insert meaningless technical quibble here) the same way the pianist's fingers did. But until it captures Glenn Gould's humming, Stevie Wonder's head-bobbing, or Tori Amos' (essentially) fucking the piano stool, I will not be fooled into thinking that I am experiencing a live performance.
(Been playing since I was four, and I prefer Steinways to Yamahas, but that's another matter.)
Now, being a pianist myself for 13 years of my 18 year life, I think I know something about piano. We truly have lost a sense of our musicality now that we are judging every individual key stroke. Faking a passage? Sorry, even though it sounds good, you still missed that F#, or maybe you cracked hitting that B. I tell you, the masters like Walter Gieseking, Horowitz, Rubinstein, they made SO MANY mistakes, in recordings and performances alike, but nobody criticized it! If those same masters tried a competition today, they wouldn't even get past the preliminary rounds!! We'd be missing out on some of the best music ever made by anybody's fingers! I say, return to the good 'ol Steinway grand, or even a Bosendorfer. Leave the mistakes for the performer to know.
Bowed Piano Ensemble
I can't read the article (not going to register) but it seems like all you guys are saying it's not possible with MIDI... yeah, of course it isn't. But if they replacing MIDI with a more flexible system like OSC, then it's totally possible. It seems like they have developed something similarly flexible with Disklavier so all the nuance and such will be included.
sig.
In a bizzare twist of events, Jimmy "w@r3zg0d" Stimmler won the Piano Competition after the other contestants decided to substitute "Chopsticks" instead of a Schubert Sonata of their choice.
Still reeling from his victory, the only comment Mr. Stimmler could say is "I 0wn J00 allz"....
Yeah yeah I know lame ass joke, and no offense to any real mr. stimmlers out there...
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
This reminds me of an interview with Kraftwerk, where they envisioned that one day they would be able to send their robots on tour and themselves staying at home in the Kling-Klang studio, sending music and video to the venue in question.
Seems like somebody else at least partially beat them to making the vision a reality.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
My family has one of the old player pianos that uses the punched out paper rolls. The only rolls we have are old "grandparent's music" so we don't use it that much (or at all, actually).
I can see a place for the new player pianos in music education and maybe at cheap religious events (cheap weddings, funerals, etc.) but unless Britney releases her next big hit in this format I doubt it will catch on for home use (aside from the $150K price issue).
The early player pianos were simple mechanisms. There was no loud and soft controls other than the pedals, so the only way of varying the intensity of the sound was by playing the notes more often. You could not repeat notes too quickly or the roll might tear along the dotted lines, so the players used an octave tremolo style that gave these performances a very distinctive sound. Plus, the machines used to live in bars, so the tuning was sometimes rough, and beer got spilled inside.
Forget them. The Ampico series B used to have 16 levels of force behind the hammers, with separate settings for the 'left hand' and 'right hand' (not individual key control, but not bad for the time). The speed of the hammers was recorded using the spark-gap timing techniques used for measuring bullet velocities, a spin-off from the armament industry for WW1. Stick a roll in one of these beasts, and close your eyes, and it's just like being at a performance. Even a CD player and hedphones has trouble sounding this good. The downside was they cost a few thousand pounds, which in its day would buy you a street of houses.
Recording was not fully automatic. People needed to exercise judgement over how to convert things like the key velocities into the 16 pressure settings. There were also some sequences of rapid notes that could not be reproduced accurately. However, they could play the roll and log the timings, and edit it until the timings got as close as possible to the original performance.
So, is it live? Well, back then they decided there was no risk of duff notes, and you don't have the actual performer present, so it was definately not live, but in some respects it was better. Same would be true today, I guess.
Beware, I'm a jazz musician, so I hold no credibility among people who work for a living...
The claim that 127 bits is enough, or that any digital device 5000 miles away can qualify as a live performance is pure bunk, and Yamaha is notorious for this kind of garbage (Am I the only one who remember's their jazz band full of WX-7 wind synths that they said would be "revolutionary?")
Simply put, the energy one puts forth when playing is not there when a computer is shoving down the hammers. I will admit:
1: 127 bits will get a pretty good velocity vector for the hammers. I'm sure whatever checks they have to determine dampers coming back on,etc are sufficient to not make it sound comical.
2: From a technical standpoint, it's a great achievement to do what Yamaha has done. It is really leaps and bounds ahead of most things out there.
BUT
that being said, where's the energy? where's the breath of life that you put into the instrument every time you play. Where's Vladmir Horowitz playing a sold out concert in moscow looking like he's calmy sitting and waiting for a bus while lambasting an opressive communist regime through the music? Where's keith jarret groaning and Philly Joe Jones responding when he belts out a solo? Allow me to indulge in an Anecdote (Courtesy of Kenny Werner's excellent book, Effortless Mastery)
"I went to Bill Evans' 50th birthday party. So many pianists were in attendance, it looked like a dictators convention. Many people played for Bill, at a piano that will remain nameless. This brand of piano has a tendency to sound bright (pop-ish is the easiest def. i can give... Paul simons electric pianos are bright... most acoustic jazz stuff (herbie hancock...) is not). All the pianists who played said piano sounded that way. Then Bill sat down to play, and he sounded dark, rich and full, on the exact same piano. Looking at his hands, the wrists were like shock absorbers. when he "dropped his fingers" (Dont worry about the def. unless you play), he had a special way of accelerating them so full yet rich force was achieved, so his whole arm / hand weight would keep the hammers where they needed to be."
Now, does the disklavier have that enrgy, that intensity? I don't think so. The point is that it's not a digital thing, playing an instrument. Trying to quantize "Soul" of music is counterproductive, and although being able to reproduce sounds in the way yamaha has been working is a great step, calling it a "live performance," and having a competition where the MIDI (sorry, disklavier...) interface records the velocities (Even if it is not recorded sound, in a way, it is a recording), is not under any definiton a live performance.
I don't know about its use in virtual concerts, but I have a set of CDs of all 32 of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas that were recorded in a single weekend (that's 10 CDs!) by concert pianist Robert Silverman. Silverman believes the system records his performances with such fidelity that its playback is equivalent to his presence at the keys. I can attest these Sonatas sound wonderful. The engineering behind this piano and recording system is quite a story.
The Bosendorfer technology has also been used in recreating performances by Sergei Rachmaninoff from original player piano rolls on the two CD volumes "Window in Time". It's amazing hearing the great Russian composer and pianist playing his own works (and works of others) on a new CD when he's been dead for almost 60 years.
No really good-quality audio recordings of his best work exist, he was born too soon. But we do have digital recordings: piano rolls he cut for player piano while he was at his prime. Five years ago or so, some smart people found some of those original piano rolls, scanned them into the computer, and converted them to MIDI files. Any adulterated roll-holes that the publisher might have added were removed -- at the time, player-piano publishers often took a razor blade and cut extra holes to make it sound like their artists had more hands. And subtle dynamic variations were added by hand to each note, since a player-piano roll has only one note attack volume (which at the time was often crudely modulated on playback anyway). As the liner notes say: "Converting Morton's old 78 recordings to computer data, we were able to study them from myriad standpoints of tempo, melodic shaping, accentuation, swung rhythms, chord voicing, and pedaling."
Then they played the files on a Disklavier in a concert hall.
It's eerie to listen to. It's this guy who was born in 1885, actual recordings he made in 1920, and it sounds... brilliant. You're not used to hearing jazz pianists from that era in CD quality on a great piano. Suddenly you realize that the 1920s did not sound like the 1920s to the 1920s. It's like seeing photographs a hundred years ago in color -- your mind knows better, but your senses go: whoa.
Conlon Nancarrow's 'Studies for Player Piano' (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000031W5A ) were created from the early fifties onward. The actual idea for such compositions dates from one of Henry Cowell's essays from the 30's. One of the first pieces, Study No. 3a-e, "The Boogie Woogie Suite," often surprises new listeners in how much like human performance and jazz improvisation these pieces sound. Nancarrow did not record players on a player piano recorder for these pieces - he hand-punched the rolls them himself. His wonderful compositions, range from jazz, flamenco, 'six-minute' concertos, temporal counterpoint, waterfalls of chords and glissandos, and truly 'out there,' but joyously beautiful creative music. These works and his brave exploration of the limits of human aural perception make him one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He also 'hacked' the player piano, using a custom-made punching machine that allowed him to punch holes *anyplace* on the roll.
He is truly one of first and greatest digital composers.
Some of his compositions have be 'ported' to the Disklavier and there was a live performance of them a few years ago at the Knitting Factory in New York.
If you can give the girl(s) instructions, it's live. In a booth, over the internet, it doesn't matter.
All this culture crap might as well be a DivX.
Seriously - a true virtuoso, a real master, adjusts the sounds she makes (okay, one more joke) to take into account the accoustics of the room and the particular accoustics of the individual piano she's playing. If the Piano is in Japan and she can't hear it, and can't hear the room it's in, I think that would subtract something from the performance of someone who plays at this level.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
For me this doesn't bring up the question of "live" vs "not live"; instead, it reminds me that authenticity is becoming more and more rare.
I understand that this is an intersting technical accomplishment, but I'm not looking forward to world of remote performances. Maybe it's just me, but I feel there's something inauthentic about it. I'd much rather see a person play a real piano and hear the sound of that piano directly (or amplified, by necessity). If that means I see fewer piano recitals (because of seating issues, time issues with the performers, etc), then that's OK - it makes those that I do see that much more special.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
I hear the argument all the time- tube vs solid state, CD vs MP3 (with hi bit rate) vs Live,
live in a cheezy bar with a moron sound guy, live in a huge stadium built for basketball, live on acoustic guitar three feet away from you, or a cheap radio shack audio tape that's been copied 4 times (4 gen loss) played on a crappy tape recorder with one 5 inch paper cone speaker.
I think it's all bunk. Some performances sound better with the crackle and hum of a radio, some sound great on a component speaker system, and some sound damn fine on a fisher price toy.
5 different judges hear five different performances, based upon where they focus their attention, how much hearing loss they've sustained over time (limits their freq response sensitivity) and heck, even the mood they are currently in.
If all the judges were "telecommuting" I would say they are missing out. But having one judge telecommute in? I think by removing one facet of the performance that forces the judge to see the same "live performance" (its done in one take. it's live. we could argue this point for hours.) in a different light. In the same way a blind judge is going to have a different performance even though they are sitting right next to you.
Probably its more of a novelty thing having this judge telecommute in. The "music community"
is far too obssessed with sonic purity and the environment impacting on the performance for it to take hold. Truth is, things sound better when you have to get dressed up, drive out, park your car (or valet), stand in line, and sample in the "electrically charged" environment of a crowded room.
But when the power is knocked out, and you have a candle and a 4th generation tape of Tom Waits on the tape recorder your french teacher used to have...
all you need to do is add the girl. And that beats out most of the live performances I've seen.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The most relevant part of the articles to this thread is the descriptions of the problems Lehrman had with the Disklaviers, most significantly the time delays between MIDI input and sound production, and how Yamaha's compensation mechanisms got in the way, a bit. Probably not a problem here, since the competition is based on MIDI files, but still quite interesting. The antheil.org site has links to all sorts of related topics, including player piano music.
(this is not a
Being a Piano or a Flute or a Double Bass, The interaction with the instrument is assently analog in nature. When you press a key on a piano the power you press the key and the speed you do it all gives different effects and a good ear can tell the difference between a true finger press on a real piano and to break it into 127 bits of data leaves a lot to be missing. I am sure it will give a close aproxmitation of that the performer is doing but not enough.
There is also a situation where the perfermer must adapt to the instrument. No instrument are the same. It takes practice and skill to work with a different instrument and to adjust on the fly to make it sound just right. On a piano a key could be a little harder to hit or softer to hit to get the right sound. Sure this idea has its uses say give a recording from a distance away. But for live performance It wouldnt be just right.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That is the hallmark of a live performance. When the performer can respond to the audience and their reaction.
A player piano is no different than lip-syncing or any other psuedo-live performance.
Truely great live performances have the performers getting into the audience as much as the audience gets in to them.
piano
Although it is probably unfair to use this technology in a piano competition, there are many other potentially great uses. You might look at this competition as a big beta test - a way to measure how authentically the piano reproduces the performance. They should judge the pianos and not the people in this competition -- it is an opportunity to see just how well Yamaha has engineered the "Player Piano" reproduction. Anyway, having said that, this technology has potentially amazing possibilities for "pedagogy" or piano teaching. Students, for example, could send in practice performances via email to their teachers. Teachers could return the email with commentary linked to specific places within the performance. The piano could keep track of how often a student practices. It could keep hours and hours of practice data, since the digital footprint of MIDI data is so much smaller than digital audio. A piano student could have a live piano lesson with a teacher in another country. Say for example I wanted to learn a piece by the Polish composer Chopin. I could look up a teacher in Poland who specializes in Chopin, and when I am nearly finished perfecting the piece, I could arrange for a lesson with the Chopin expert. Although the performance possibilities of this technology are a little dubious, the educational benefits could be wonderful -- bringing distance learning to a discipline (Music) that would hardly have imagined this possibility.
I attended a recent show at the hall where the finals of this competition will be held.
The upcoming competition was featured in the program for the evening's preformance.
The main reason they presented for using the remote judges was to allow highly recognized piano soloists to be judges. Usually these people are too busy with performance committments to attend a week long competition and serve as a judge.
Past competitions have been used piano coaches and instructors as judges, and have been marred with accusations of bias on the part of the judging -- like only students of the coaches making it to the finals.
The competition's lost one of the judges.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
Then the musicians' union contract came up for renewal. The casinos wanted to use taped rather than live music for the smaller shows. The union went on strike, demanding all live music all the time, wiht no room for compromise.
Having no choice, the casinos then used taped music for *all* the shows--and found that noone cared. The "live" music had already been coming from another floor, piped in electronically.
Eventually, the union withered away. (heck, they may still claim to be on strike for all I know
The bottom line was that the union single-handedly destroyed the employment prospects for musicians in las vegas. I handled a couple of their bankruptcies. And they paid dues for that . .
hawk
The Disklavier system (unless they've made a recent upgrade that I'm not aware of) is not precise enough to completely mirror the original performance. In general, Disklavier files are MIDI with some metadata. If they were looking for true competition grade reproducing pianos, they should have gone with the Bosendorfer 290SE. The files it creates are much higher resolution (higher sampling rate of the hammers) and in general a higher bitrate file format. The Bosendorfer has been used in competitions before (of course, you expected that with /.), although only one piano was used (no variation). It's been used commercially in Stereophile's collection of Beethoven's Sonata's and by Telarc to bring Rachmaninoff back from the dead.
Alan Dang
www.firingsquad.com
Random Fact: While developing one of the early reproducing pianos, Clarence Hickman developed a high speed camera system that he later used in WW2 to develop the bazooka.
Of course, a lot of people quoted in the article, as well as people posting here, are saying that there are real audible differences. I suspect that there aren't any audible differences, and it's an easy test to make: take some of the people who judge these competitions, and give them a blindfolded test to see if they can tell the real performance from the Disklavier one.
If, as I suspect, there is no audible difference, then we have to ask whether the supposed non-audible advantages of live performance are important enough to outweigh the very real advantages of using the Disklavier. The article made it clear that there was a compelling reason for wanting to use the Disklaver: they can't find judges who are real professional peformers to judge these competitions, because their touring schedules don't allow it. According to the guy pushing for the Disklavier system, the quality of the judging is really bad in most of these competitions.
Find free books.
Transmitted music is just a lossy compression algorithm for reproducing the audio. You can't reproduce the actual performance of the human.
How many people go to a Tori Amos concert because she's a good piano player?
Is Andre Rieu (my mom's favorite) a great piano player? or a really good piano player that is attractive too?
Ben Folds is a good piano player, but an excellent performer.
The assertion made is that digital sampling of the inputs on the piano, recording the digital samples and playing them back is different enough from a live performance to be inferrior. I will stipulate that the visual presence of the artist adds to a live performance, but set that aside for a moment.
It is a lot like the Turing test in some regard. If you blindfold an audience and play them the same song first by a live musician and second by recording the *same* live musician, and if the audience can't reliably pick out which is the recording and which is the musician, then I'd say the recording technology in question passes the test.
Legitimate arguments can still be made that the performer may change his performance to suit different circumstances, and such adaptations would not be possible with a recording. But those arguments lie outside the confines of whether or not the recording mechanism is sufficiently accurate to capture and reproduce a single performance by the artist.
But in the context of a competition, I believe it may be actually be a benefit to the objectivity of the judging. The judges won't know who is who, so no favoritism will be possible. The artists' inability to tailor their performances for the judges will be a hinderance borne equally by all of the contestants. But unlike an audio recording, no extraneous noise other than that made by the performer will be recorded.
I agree with the other folks here. This ain't a live performance by any stretch. Besides the obvious limitations of MIDI (127 volume levels), and the fact that the pianos are different (the performer is in a feedback loop with Piano #1, if Piano #1 is a little too bright or too quiet in certain registers, the performer will adjust so the piece sounds right to him/her). Besides all these things, you don't get to watch the performer play.
I recall a story about a piano teacher who played a note with her hand, and with the end of her umbrella, with the student's eyes open and closed. What they found out was that even though notes played with the umbrella and the hand sounded the same to the students with their eyes closed, the notes "seemed" to sound different with their eyes open.
Probably because in their minds, the umbrella note was devoid of emotion, while the hand note wasn't, even though technically, it didn't make a difference how the key was pressed. Also when a person is sitting at the piano, they themselves are giving a performance, through their attitude, their body motions, their facial expressions, even through how much they sweat or what they're wearing.
All of this is gone when you here a MIDI recording. The Disklaviers are damn cool instrument (I play the piano and I've been wanting to buy one for years) but it shouldn't be used like this!
Let me just say that if we recorded performances digitally using 127-bit samples -- it'd probably sound *better* than live.
Consumer sound cards (and your CD player) work on 16-bit audio. The state of the art pro-grade stuff works at 24-bit after a few transitional years (largely due to ADAT's popularity) at 20-bit.
Now, if you are instead referring to the velocity level of a MIDI note event, yes there are 127 non-zero *levels*, but not 127 BITS.
And that's 127 data points on any velocity curve you like -- whatever instruments you are playing back on (and heck, even the controller instruments the performer is playing on) can have those 127 data points mapped to/from any given velocity curve.
Remember folks, MIDI was designed in the *very* early 80's (i.e., a *long* time before my mom bought a 4.77MHz 8086 Compaq for $3,000) both as a physical interface standard, *and* a data exchange standard. It's long in the tooth, particularly in the velocity levels area, but people have come up with brilliant mappings on top of this old standard.
And don't forget that you can transmit about 100 MIDI streams in the same bandwidth required for *one* (and mono at that) audio stream. No, it's not the same thing -- but this "performance" could be transmitted over a 2400 baud modem.
I'll be attending the e-competition both tonight (6:00pm) and tomorrow night (7:30pm). I may attend Sunday, but probably won't. Tomorrow has all the MUST SEE pieces for me. I'm a huge geek and in geek circles, but I've also played the piano for 17.5 years now (I'm 24 now) and none of my geek friends are into this kind of thing. Anyway, I thought it may be fun if a group of cultured slashdotters grab some of the cheaper tickets and split parking expenses. I just called the ticket office and there are plenty available. Can't guarentee if/how this will work out, but I thought I'd send some last-minute feelers out there. Write to piano_e_competition@yahoo.com if interested and I might see you there!
char *mySig;
My father is a Yamaha Concert Artist and owns two Yahaha pianos (neither Disklavier-equipped), on one of which I completed most of my piano studies before the age of 14. I also own a non-Disklavier Yamaha piano, and I like it. I sang professionally for eight years and have significant experience with the playback capability of the Yamaha Disklavier system.
I have yet to hear a Disklavier performance that I was able to distinguish from the original performance. The critical difference from most other forms of reproduced music is that an actual piano is reproducing the performance, not a system of amplified loudspeakers. Although no one has produced evidence for this instance in support or detraction, I imagine it would be very much in Yamaha's interests to ensure the performing and judging pianos were quite close to one another in timbric character. I know from personal experience that Yamaha have the resources and dedication to match the pianos to below human interpretive tolerance, if they believed doing so were to their corporate benefit.
That said, I prefer live performances myself, and no, I don't know exactly why. I like seeing the performer, breathing the same air, hearing the notes ring out at the same instant the performer is hearing them.
An objective, professional judge with years more education and years more experience than I might have a different opinion. Evidently this judge in question has. I defer to his/er professionalism, and I further have the temerity to suggest many of us would do well to follow suit.
So there.
Would be interesting...
If the system uses MIDI, it is already not capable of performing correctly. Under MIDI, if yuo try to have multiple hits at once, they do not broadcast at the same time, but rather in a sequence, with a 1-10ms delay inbetween the data. Play this data in a concert hall, and those small delays become more and more apparent with the reverb. This is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE especially in a piano performance environment. All these replys that are saying "oh the piano is in a different envorionment so it'd sound different!" .. that's the LEAST of the problems if the system is using MIDI. MIDI is an outdated piece of SHIT standard created in the 80s. It sucks. Stay away from MIDI. Horrible horrible horrible.
I wear my "MIDI sucks" shirt with pride.
under MIDI specifications, you can only transmit one controller message at a time, so if yuo want to play a chord for example, all at the exact same time (yes i know it's humanly impossible to hit at the same time), it wouldn't say "CEG" all at once.. it'd first say "C velocity 80" "E velocity 92" "G velocity 50" .. now if you8're hitting the pedals at the while playing the keys, either the pedal movenets or the note your playuing has to take precidence... so SOMETHING will be "off" and not how it was originally played.
that's fucked up if you ask me. midi sucks
This totally defeats the point of live performance.
How does the audience acknowledge the performer? I remember giving half-hour piano performances where I'd have applause between works. One could argue that this disrupts the performer and interferes with the musical output; in reality, nobody ever performs the way they practise (in private, perhaps) due to the differing state of mind.
Without an audience, there is simply no adrenaline, leading to a more casual performance -- there's less of a tendency to pour emotions into your music, sometimes even at the relatively negligible cost of technical errors. Due to the mental exhaustion of practising like this, nobody really does it until they're in "performance mode". On a more pragmatic note, one of the issues performers deal with is the acoustic environment in which they play. Virtual performances do away with this...
Well, no responses from slashdotters, but I attended the finals yesterday (Friday) and today (Saturday). Very, very nice (Especially Rach. 2 today--wow). I don't know if the piano sounds quite the same at the other end, but my feeling is that there are few people as resisting of technology as hardcore classical musicians (eg the judges). If it's good enough for them then I probably can't tell the difference. Just my two cents on that one. Again, great performances and a lot of fun. I hope I'm not the only cultured geek in the twin cities :)
char *mySig;
You know, when people complain about digital technology ruining the music, I can't help rolling my eyes. Sure, incorrectly implemented technology can change the way the music sounds. When it's done right, though, it can only get better.
Mr. Maul here thinks the lack of quantization in the paper roll makes the music "real". Yeah, well, when the quantization gets smaller than the normal variations in friction of the pins against the sides of the holes in the paper, especially as the paper wears, then one has a digital recording system more accurate than the paper roll, quantization or no.
I will admit, there's a certain special something when someone is performing live you can't get from a recording. But just because that recording is digital doesn't mean it's any less special.