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First Virtual Piano Competition

Posted by timothy on from the tickling-ivory-from-afar dept.

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."

2 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Nuance is the essence of music by reddawnman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Jelly Roll Morton's Piano Rolls by jamie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One of the CDs I picked up recently was Piano Rolls by Jelly Roll Morton. He was one of the kings of ragtime back in the days before the electric microphone had been invented. He was a powerful, arrogant, flashy player who would often make a living by moving from town to town in Louisiana and challenging local players to a "duel." (No RIAA back then! I'm not quite sure what the revenue model was for having a hoedown with some honky-tonk player, but apparently he made it work.)

    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.