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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."
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.
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 are a few things that might not be captured, such as the speed at which a damper is replaced on the strings when a note or the pedal is released. I don't know if the system accurately reproduces this. Certainly MIDI wouldn't.
I suspect the main difference between a live performance and a performance from a Disklavier is that a live performer is constantly adjusting his touch to account for the individual characteristics of the piano, whereas IFAIK the Disklavier system does not have this feedback loop.
So it would only sound exactly the same if the piano used to play back the performance was identical in touch and tone to the piano that recorded the performance.
Mind you, I doubt if I or many others would notice the difference.
In the case of the other piano, elsewhere in the world, there will be subtle differences in the instrument itself. Even if you can (and this is arguable) reproduce 99% of the nuance of the actual key velocity, you're not taking into account the fact that the musician is feeling and reacting to a separate instrument with a key action which must be different, affecting his touch, and with possible harmonic and amplitude differences across the piano keyboard range even given the same key velocity.
But first and foremost this is most certainly NOT live music. It's reproduced mechanically, and that is no different from playing a CD (reproduced optically). Just because it's a real piano you're hearing, it's not the same piano the artist was playing. And he/she's not even there.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
But the pianist will be responding to the touch and feel of the piano (s)he's actually playing: I know, I'm a pianist. So unless they have an *identical* piano, in *identical* humidity, etc (which is impossible, given the subtleties a really good piano contains), they can't possibly have a 100% accurate reproduction.
The question is, is it accurate *enough* for this purpose? I would claim "no", but I've never seen the system in action.
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
That was a very good synopsis of what analog really means! Thank you for posting!
Mod this up.
Composition rules. Digital always wants to take the 'easy route' and simply 'composite' which is not the same as composition... which requires not only skill but experience and insight as well.
thanks again for saying as much.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
> There are a few things that might not be captured, such as the speed at which a damper is replaced on the strings when a note or the pedal is released. I don't know if the system accurately reproduces this. Certainly MIDI wouldn't.
According to this, it will. It can record both the speed at which the note is triggered as well as it is released. From the specs:
Note Off
Category: Voice
Purpose
Indicates that a particular note should be released. Essentially, this means that the note stops sounding, but some patches might have a long VCA release time that needs to slowly fade the sound out. Additionally, the device's Hold Pedal controller may be on, in which case the note's release is postponed until the Hold Pedal is released. In any event, this message either causes the VCA to move into the release stage, or if the Hold Pedal is on, indicates that the note should be released (by the device automatically) when the Hold Pedal is turned off. If the device is a MultiTimbral unit, then each one of its Parts may respond to Note Offs on its own channel. The Part that responds to a particular Note Off message is the one assigned to the message's MIDI channel.
Status
0x80 to 0x8F where the low nibble is the MIDI channel.
Data
Two data bytes follow the Status.
The first data is the note number. There are 128 possible notes on a MIDI device, numbered 0 to 127 (where Middle C is note number 60). This indicates which note should be released.
The second data byte is the velocity, a value from 0 to 127. This indicates how quickly the note should be released (where 127 is the fastest). It's up to a MIDI device how it uses velocity information. Often velocity will be used to tailor the VCA release time. MIDI devices that can generate Note Off messages, but don't implement velocity features, will transmit Note Off messages with a preset velocity of 64.
Yours truly,
Dave
...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.
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
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