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."
dinky dinky diny dink
pinkety plinkety plonk
BONNNNNG!
I R00z j00!!!!!
From a distance Slashdot looks blue and green,
And the Malda pale and white
From a distance the the Jon Katz meets the team,
And the choir boys take to flight
From a distance, there is hegemony,
And it echoes through the land
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace,
It's the voice of every man
From a distance we all have cocks stuffed,
And no ass is in need
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease,
No hungry mouths to feed
From a distance we are instruments
Marching in a common band
Playing songs of hope, playing songs of peace
They're the songs of every man
Rob is watching us, Rob is watching us
Rob is watching us from a distance
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon. He will be missed :(
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 GNU/Stallman diaries. Issue 2.
:( <--- thats a sad face! Eric showed me it on his AOL account. Look at it sideways and you'll see!
Greetings Comrades! Welcome to issue 2 of the GNU/Stallman diaries!
This issue contains part 1 of a 2 part story. I had to split it into two because GNU/Hurd keeps crashing!
Yesterday my good friend Eric called me on the telephone and suggested I take a break from writing GNU/Hurd and that we take a visit to the Zoo. I told him he was crazy and that GNU/Hurd and the glorious peoples revolution it will create were far more important!
"But Dick," said Eric. "They have a butterfly show on today."
Well! If it's got butterflies, I'm there! So off we went to the Zoo!
Eric is a little slow, he has Downs Syndrome or something, so the walk to the Zoo took about 3 hours. When we finally arrived I saw huge posters covered in pretty butterflies! I was so excited!
No sooner had we walked in the gates when Eric needed to go to the toilet. I told him to go before we left but would he listen? Oh no of course not! Luckily I had my bone flute so I got it out and had a quick play whilst waiting for Eric.
Poor Eric, he recently lost his job. Something to do with carpentry at a hospital I think. Planks or boards had something to do with it and it may have been a veterans hospital. I'm none too sure though. I'm always too busy with the GNU/Hurd and filosi^H^H^H^H^H^H philosa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H thinking about the glorious uprising of the oppressed working class and unwashed masses rising up in a glorious peoples revolution of Cheap Software against the evil tryanny of expensive supported corporate closed software that has created a world of bureaucratic mind control of the masses of oppressed peopl...
Errr. Sorry about that. Now where was I...
Oh yes - butterflies! Everyone knows I like butterflies. I have a big paper one stuck to my computer that I made and colored in myself. I like to look at it while I play with my bone flute.
Eric finally finished his toilet business and we could finally get to see what we had come for.
To be Continued...
The capitalist system carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. - Carl Marx
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
Index of /contrib
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.
The Disclavier system actually passes a lot of demanding audio tests when compared with a real piano.
For example, on August 3, 1997, I decided to castrate myself. At 3:30 pm, I started to prepare my scrotum and testicles to be removed. I banded the scrotum at the top just below the penis. I used rubber bands. (I should have used an elastrator to band the scrotum but since I didn't have one I improvised.) Next I took ice and packed the scrotum and testicles so that I wouldn't be in pain as in prior experimenting with banding them it was extremely painful.
During the next 8 hour period I kept them well iced. While I had them iced I prepared the bathroom with the necessary instruments to remove them with. I got a sharp pair of scissors, bandages, leather shoelace, peroxide, neosporin, clean white towels, sterile needle, mercerized thread, a bowl (to put them in once removed), the telephone and made sure the front door was unlocked (in case of emergency).
At 11:15 pm, I entered the bathroom and prepared myself to remove the scrotum and testicles. I removed the ice packs, took the leather shoelace and wrapped it around the scrotum over the rubber bands to make sure it is extremely tight so as not to bleed excessively.
At 11:30 pm, I took the scissors and started from the left to the right (since I am left-handed) cutting straight across the scrotum. With my right hand I held the scrotum and testicles firmly so that I can cut straightly. When I had successfully removed them I put them in the bowl. I took the peroxide and cleaned the area where the scrotum and testicles once were. I left the area like that for about 45 minutes while I took photographs of what I did. I then went to start stitching the area up when I started to spurt blood due to the leather shoelace and rubber bands slipping. I immediately took the clean white towels and packed the area with them.
I didn't want to take a chance since I was by myself so I called 911 and told them what happened. Soon afterward the ambulance and police arrived. I explained to the EMT's what I did. They took sterile packing and repacked the area. I was then transported to the hospital. The police locked up the house for me since I wasn't able to. (BTW, nothing ever happened with the police department.) In the ambulance the EMT's put an IV in me. The EMT's by the way did take the scrotum and testicles to the hospital as well. Unfortunately they ended up staying at the hospital.
Upon arriving at the hospital, the emergency room doctor called a Urologist to see me after he made sure I wasn't bleeding further excessively. When the Urologist got there, he examined me, the scrotum and testicles. He told me that he wasn't going to reattach the scrotum and testicles. (Which I already knew since they had been dead for so long.) He said that all they were going to do is stop the bleeding and sew me up. He explained that they had to cut a 1" incision on both sides above the penis so they can close the blood vessels. Once they have done that they would removed the bands and shoelace to see what type of damage was done. I waited in the emergency room hallway for over an hour and a half since all the operating rooms were being used.
At 2:00 am on August 4th, I was wheeled into the operating room. At 4:30 am I was wheeled out into the recovery room. I was then moved to the surgical intensive care unit at 5:30 am where I was still hooked up to an IV. For the next 24 hours I was kept on antibiotics being put in my IV. Later, in the morning, the Urologist came in with the medical students. He told me that I almost cut into the urethra and that if I did I would leak urine for the rest of my life. I laughed at him and told him he was full of shit because when they do the sex change surgery they cut, shorten and relocate the urethra.
In the afternoon, a shrink was sent in to evaluate me. I thought fast and gave a rational explanation of why I did it. When I was finished He told me I was very much aware of what I did and not psychotic and knew what I was doing.
The next morning after the last antibiotic was finished in my IV, the IV was removed and all that I needed to do was urinate twice and each had to be a good amount. Later in the afternoon I was dismissed from the hospital.
When I got home my Master at the time took pictures of me. He was very upset as I had done the castration while He was out of town. He didn't want me castrated at all. I spent a month recouperating at home. At the end of the month I was pretty much healed up. My Master for the rest of the time I was with Him punished me for what I did.
I don't recommend anyone doing what I did especially by yourself. If you do decided to try it make sure someone else is with you and use an elastrator NOT rubber bands and leather shoelace like I did. I have a medical background which is why I did it by myself. Also research what you are going to do so that you know what you are doing for sure.
My next project will be getting the penis removed which is more complicated because of 8 blood vessels in the penis of which 6 are major ones where you can bleed to death if not careful. This is the true way a slave should be. Neither male nor female just an it.
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?
redneck wanker, he deserved to die!@
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.
crapfloods and trolling and raping small kittens
nice wider pages and wanking with mittens
turd report packages tied up with strings
these are a few of my favorite things
grits covered portman and ASCII art doodles
ACs and CLITers and Katz sex with poodles
wild trolls that fly with plus five mod scoring
these are a few of my favorite things
when the ban hits, when I can't post, when I'm feeling sad
i simply remember my favorite things
then i don't feel so bad
Rob Malda chugs penis in fan fiction slashes
taco snot over my nose and eyelashes
BSD dying and that goatse ring
these are a few of my favorite things
grits covered portman and ASCII art doodles
ACs and CLITers and Katz sex with poodles
wild trolls that fly with plus five mod scoring
these are a few of my favorite things
when the ban hits, when I can't post when, I'm feeling sad
i simply remember my favorite things
then i don't feel so bad
yeah! yeah!
I CLAIM THIS FIRST POST FOR AC'S EVERYWHERE!
You will burn in hell.
-AC Jebus
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) -- An attacker crashed a bomb-laden vehicle into a guard post outside the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, on Friday, killing himself and at least six other people and injuring 45.
The massive blast incinerated a dozen cars, blew a 10-foot-wide hole in the compound wall, and sent debris flying a half-mile.
No Americans were believed killed, but one U.S. Marine and five Pakistani employees in the consulate were lightly injured.
Some of the victims were blown apart, making it difficult to determine exactly how many people were killed.
The Interior Ministry reported seven dead and 45 injured, but reporters said they saw two bodies and the scene and six at hospitals. The victims included four Pakistani police constables, a male passer-by and an unidentified woman, along with the bomber, police said.
Police said the bomb was concealed in a white vehicle, believed to be a Suzuki van, that the driver crashed into a police kiosk at the southern end of the consulate at 11:08 a.m. (1:08 a.m. EDT), leaving a crater five feet deep and a hole about 10 feet wide in the 10-foot-high perimeter wall.
It also damaged the nearby Marriott Hotel and shattered windows in the consulate and other buildings up to a block away.
Mark Wentworth, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, said six consulate employees -- one U.S. Marine security guard and five Pakistani employees -- suffered minor injuries when struck by flying debris.
He said the bomb exploded about 50 feet from the building and that it sustained some structural damage.
Sharif Ajnabi, a private security guard, was sitting in a park across the street from the consulate when the bomb went off.
``I heard a deafening explosion,'' he said. ``There was smoke everywhere.''
``Moments later, I saw a man's body flying in the air, and it fell near me. He was badly injured. Before we could give him water or medical help, he died. It was a horrifying scene.''
Witnesses said U.S. Marines took up protective positions around the consulate. They also reported seeing body parts scattered about the scene.
Ambulances shuttled the injured to nearby hospitals. What appeared to be wreckage from the car was stuck in a water fountain and in trees.
``This is sheer terrorism,'' said Javed Ashraf Hussein, the chief secretary of Sindh province, who visited the scene of carnage. ``We have put this area under high alert and heavy security, but the terrorists struck.''
He would not comment on who might be responsible.
Karachi Mayor Naimat Ullah offered sympathy for U.S. officials and vowed to arrest those behind the attack.
``The terrorists have no religion. They are not Muslim. They are not human. They are just terrorists,'' Ullah said.
Violence against foreigners by Islamic militants has increased since Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf threw his support behind the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and murdered in Karachi in January while working on a story about Islamic militants.
Suicide attacks -- once unheard of here -- have occurred twice. Both were believed to have been carried out by al-Qaida.
On March 17, a suicide grenade attack at a church in Islamabad's diplomatic enclave killed five people, including two Americans.
Last month, 11 French engineers and three others were killed in a suicide bombing in front of a Karachi hotel less than a mile from Friday's blast.
The United States withdrew all nonessential personnel from Pakistan after the church bombing, and the British mission evacuated about 150 staff in late May after receiving ``credible'' information about a terrorist assault.
Also, in early June a diplomatic source said several hundred foreigners working for the United Nations in Pakistan were ordered to send their families home because of fears of a war between India and Pakistan.
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.
meh
...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
can't wait for issue 3
First post succesfully reclaimed for to the AC's!!!!!!!
--AC Jebus
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.
hear the man sing
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.
June 13, 2002
An International E-Competition Relies on the High-Tech E-Piano
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Early this evening in St. Paul a panel of seven pianists will gather in the intimate Sundin Music Hall on the campus of Hamline University to judge the six young finalists in a new international piano competition. But in an unprecedented move, an eighth judge, Yefim Bronfman, with the highest profile among these pianists, will also be evaluating the finalists. From Hamamatsu, Japan. Where it will be early Friday morning.
How is this possible? Welcome to the first International Piano-e-Competition.
Mr. Bronfman, whom the contest's Web site (www.piano-e-competition.com) calls an "e-judge," is to sit in a 200-seat recital hall in the international headquarters of the Yamaha Corporation listening to the performances of the young pianists in St. Paul as reproduced onstage through a Yamaha Disklavier Pro piano, essentially a 21st-century player piano. With Yamaha as one of the sponsors of the competition, it has a blatantly promotional underlay. But beyond product placement, the contest does raise questions about the uniqueness of live performance and the appropriate uses of ever-advancing technology in music.
For this round the finalists are required to play any Schubert sonata of their choice. As Mr. Bronfman hears each disembodied performance, he will be able to watch a video relay of the actual Schubert-playing performer in St. Paul, synced exactly to the music.
Though these pianos are Yamaha concert grands that can be played like any standard piano, they are equipped with the Disklavier computer system, the most advanced of several on the market that strive to replicate a pianist's performance. (A Disklavier Pro concert grand retails for $152,995, while a standard nine-foot Yamaha sells for $25,000 to $30,000.)
These systems, their promoters and champions assert, can precisely analyze and store every nuance of touch, every pedaling effect in a pianist's performance. The stored performance, they say, can then be reproduced on the piano with the flick of a switch, or downloaded onto another Disklavier piano and reproduced with the same exactitude.
The idea for involving e-judges in the competition originated with Alexander Braginsky, 58, a professor of piano at the University of Minnesota School of Music as well as the co-founder, president and artistic director of the Piano-e-Competition, who approached Yamaha for its support.
The Moscow-born Mr. Braginsky was "raised in the most competitive musical environment ever," he said in a recent interview from Minneapolis. So he is dismayed that competitions have lost respect among large segments of the profession, he said. Though most critics would say the problem stems from the basic inappropriateness of trying to rank artistic performances, Mr. Braginsky blames the inadequate quality of the judging.
When he moved to the West, he was often asked to be a competition judge. "Everywhere I went, I met the same judges," Mr. Braginsky said.
They were typically retired pianists, pianists with modest performing schedules, former competition finalists whose careers had not fulfilled early expectations and teachers. "They traveled from one competition to another," he added.
He said he wanted to entice into the judging ranks notable concert pianists like the Russian-born Mr. Bronfman. But pianists with heavy touring schedules are often not free to judge long competitions. (This one began June 4 and concludes on Sunday.) The answer? Bring the competition to the touring pianists.
Mr. Bronfman, on tour in Korea and Japan, is scheduled to arrive in Hamamatsu late tonight from Seoul. He has agreed only to help with the final rounds during the next four days.
Mr. Bronfman's colleague and New York neighbor, the pianist Emanuel Ax, had originally agreed to join him in Japan as a second e-judge. But Mr. Ax pulled out a few months ago, he said in a recent interview, because of a scheduling conflict.
His withdrawal clearly rattled the competition's organizers. As recently as last week Mr. Ax's name was still prominently featured on the event's Web site.
When contacted this week, Mr. Ax said that it was his understanding that he had been asked to judge the finals by means of a "video feed" alone. He called the Disklavier "a fabulous gadget" and said he was considering using one to help in practicing.
Still, despite his enthusiasm for the Disklavier, Mr. Ax said that he would have found relying on one to judge a young pianist's performance "very weird." When his schedule conflict forced him to withdraw, he felt relieved in some ways, he said.
Mr. Bronfman expressed excitement over his own role. "I thought it would be kind of neat to be sitting in a little room in Japan and seeing what happened in Minnesota at the same time," he said in an interview from Seoul.
But it will not be exactly the same time. It takes roughly 30 minutes to transmit and download a performance over the Internet.
Still, though he sees "enormous possibilities" for this technology to reach wider audiences, as of Monday he had never tried out or heard a Yamaha Disklavier. "If I have any doubts about what I hear," he said, "I will not submit my remarks."
As Mr. Ax indicated, the Disklavier piano is a fabulous gadget. James Wooten, the director of the services department at Yamaha Artists Services in Chelsea, explained that the key mechanism of a grand piano is a long, thin piece of wood that functions like a seesaw. A Disklavier computer uses fiber-optic sensors to calibrate the speed, pressure and touch of the finger's impact on the exposed end of the seesaw.
A Disklavier piano is equipped with electronic solenoids that essentially lift the other end of the wooden seesaw when the stored performance is played back. Measuring pedaling effects is far more complicated. But the Yamaha engineers, who pioneered this technology in the late 1980's, have made enormous advances in recent years, though other manufacturers of pianos, both acoustic and digital, have also done work in this field.
On Tuesday at the Yamaha studio I heard a Disklavier reproduction of excerpts of a performance of Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7 played on June 8 in St. Paul on another Disklavier by Edisher Savitski, who was recently named one of the finalists. The disembodied performance sounded uncannily real, full of nuance, sweep, clarity and power. I then played part of a Beethoven bagatelle and listened with genuine amazement to the playback.
But it's one thing to listen to yourself for purposes of self-study. I would be loath to venture any opinion about Mr. Savitski's Prokofiev performance in Minnesota based on the Disklavier reproduction in New York. After all, the pianos, though identical models, were different, as were the room, humidity, weather and acoustics: all the things that affect how a piano performance sounds in a particular space on a particular day.
Michael Bates, the director of academic and institutional relations for the Yamaha piano division, said that to make the differences between the pianos in Minnesota and Hamamatsu as insignificant as possible, the Yamaha piano factory built three Disklavier concert grands in succession, specifically intended for the competition. And technicians in the two places strove to voice the pianos similarly. Voicing is a process that primarily involves adjusting the hardness or softness of the felt hammers that strike the strings. The idea is to make the piano sound even from bottom to top of the keyboard, so that no notes stick out in an ungainly way.
But no two machines as complicated as grand pianos ever turn out alike. And voicing is a subjective art.
Even putting aside reservations about differences in halls and hammers, what about the human factor in a piano performance? Pianists learn to adjust their touches to a particular piano with a degree of refinement that would seem impossible to calibrate. And no measuring system can replicate an artistic presence, the vibes of the performer, however charismatic, tender or surly.
In some ways it's easier to trust the fidelity of those scratchy old 1930's recordings of Artur Schnabel performing the Beethoven sonatas. All the elegance, sparkle and vigor of his playing come through with affecting presence and honesty.
Some promoters of the Disklavier promise more a faithful mode of enjoying piano performances than recordings. They envision a future when, instead of buying a Martha Argerich CD, one could pop a floppy disk into a deluxe Disklavier and hear her performance, albeit without Ms. Argerich's galvanic presence. But isn't this prospect, to borrow a word from Mr. Ax, just weird?
This weekend the finalists in the piano competition will perform concertos (which must be chosen from a restricted list of repertory staples) at Orchestral Hall in Minneapolis. Mr. Bronfman will judge these performances via high-tech video and audio relay systems. Will the day come when an orchestra will accompany a Disklavier playing Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto? Don't laugh.
It's hard to know how the judges in Minnesota, who include some distinguished artists, like the superb Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomsic, will factor in Mr. Bronfman's opinions from afar. Among them there is some discomfort over the use of the Disklavier. The pianist Abby Simon, 80, chairman of the judges, said the technology "adds some oddness to the whole business."
Promoters say that the competition's main purpose is to bring attention to young talents. There are typical cash awards (with a $25,000 first prize) and performance opportunities for the top winners. But bringing attention to the Disklavier seems a comparably important goal.
"If they were not using this technology in Japan," Mr. Bronfman said, "we would not be talking about this competition in Minnesota."
Exactly.
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.
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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.