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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."
But the pianist will be responding to the touch and feel of the piano (s)he's actually playing: I know, I'm a pianist. So unless they have an *identical* piano, in *identical* humidity, etc (which is impossible, given the subtleties a really good piano contains), they can't possibly have a 100% accurate reproduction.
The question is, is it accurate *enough* for this purpose? I would claim "no", but I've never seen the system in action.
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
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.