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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."
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!
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.
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?
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
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.
...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
> You didn't even manage to sing yourselves out of the contest, did you? ;-}
I don't know, but I sure hope that we did. Although I think the most fun part in the contest is to follow the fuss before the contest and the newspapers screaming "this year, we will win" and then all the conspiracy theories when they realize the finnish contestant only won the worst song contest.
...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.
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
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.
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
A band called Future Sound of London (aka FSOL) have been doing this for years, they send out their lighting rig and stage set, and pipe the audio live to the gig over ISDN.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
Find free books.
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!
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;
The article states pretty clearly that 7 of the judges for the competition will be watching the performances live. It is only the 8th judge who will be judging the Disklavier performance. This isn't a competition where people send in an audition tape (or in this case, a floppy disk) to represent them. The performance will be LIVE for 7 of the 8 judges, so I doubt there will be any cheating.
In my mind, it isn't much different from submitting audition tapes vs. auditioning live, and audition tapes are a widely accepted practice.
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...
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...
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.