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)
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.
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
So does live mean bound by time or space? In other words, does the musician need to be in front of me doing h/er thing, or just doing that thing at the same moment as I am listening to that thing? And what do you mean by editing and mastering in between the performance and the recording? The sound crew better be editing and mastering during a live performance.... Even the musicians need to adjust a knob now and again; how is that not editing? The definition of "live" is already in crisis....
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.
Long time no see indeed. I'm quite surpised anybody still remembers me :)
Anyways, in the case of Milli Vanilli I doubt it was the high quality music that persuaded the crowds, but rather the good-looking artists, their tropical clips etc.
Which leads me to wonder how the public would react if say, Mark Knopfler, turned out to be a fake. The music of Dire Straits hardly depended on personality of funky clips to be interesting...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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