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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."

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  1. 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.