Slashdot Mirror
Concert to be Performed from Beyond the Grave
rtphokie writes "Raleigh, NC based Zenph Studios is hosting a live concert performed by two piano virtuosi long since dead. Zenph developed software which digitally transcribes performances even from the scratchy recordings. A more faithful transcription of timing, key and pedal pressure is achieved using Yamaha's high resolution version of MIDI."
Only 4 hours from me. darn sounds cool how they do these.
Here comes elvis next.
Coupling a performance like this with a 3D Projected likeness of the artist would be mindblowing. The projection wouldn't even have to be very good.. but being able to visualize the person while hearing the digital "passion" in their notes.. live.. would be something amazing.
I thought this was going to be about dead musicians coming back from the grave to kill those who use their music as ring tones. Still cool though.
Unfortunately insiders acknowledged that it would be impossible to bring Michael Jackson's mucis back from the dead.
Glen Gould is alive in my heart.
The Custom Mary
... not that I'm surprised by a Slashdot (or submitted article) being misleading, but there's not much to crow about here.
We're talking about a slightly more modern idea of the old player pianos. Stuff that matters indeed..
This story is pretty low on the accuracy scale, at least from a technical standpoint. I don't think they're talking about some new form of MIDI as the teaser statement implies. The author of the article just seems to think that MIDI is "high-def", which is pretty funny, actually. Especially considering how slow MIDI's transmission speed is.
/. just today released a story about PR works.
Can you guess the 3 experts and who payed for this one?
And by the way: who want's to ear this old gizzers, anyway?
I am portuguese. If you think my written english is bad, try posting in portuguese!
Part of the charm of Glenn Gould's recordings stems from the fact that you can hear him humming along with the music if you listen carefully. I guess he drove recording techs nuts.
They're creepy and they're kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They're all together ooky,
The Addams Family.
da da da da. tum tum.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Attempts to transcribe polyphonic notes are typically only 80 percent successful, says New Scientist. About 10 percent of polyphonic notes are missing and another 10 percent are mistranscribed, which can give the replicated music a hollowness or discordance.
Zenph Studios, a software company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, claims that it has found a solution to the problem, although it refuses to say how for commercial reasons.
By taking the musical score into account?
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/articles/zenph/ index.html
Agile Artisans
FTA:
"live rendition of ancient recordings made by Alfred Cortot in 1928 and Glenn Gould in 1962."
1962???. What WAS the world like in those dark times??? Can anyone even begin to imagine the dark power we risk unleasahing upon the world?? Oh yeah, really ancient...Ooooooooohhh, ancient and scary!! What if they come back to life as mummies and go on a rampage for defaming their ancient masterpieces??!!!
And the CD sounds pretty darned good. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 005J1I/103-9970286-1975026?v=glance
Is a (not-so-) live concert by the legendary Hotblack Desiato.
Unfortunately, he's spending a year dead for tax purposes, but hey, we can't but hope, eh?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Maybe they can rent the space to parents who want to take pictures of their 2 mo playing the piano. Even better, take videos of this, and send it to all your relatives, just to show that your smoking during your pregency DID NOT affect your child at all.
The piano, the polyphony from a MIDI thing, or scratchy music.
Or did I miss something...
I think the cool part is getting it to work with scratchy music.
You have been warned.
Gives a whole new perspective on the term 'de-composing'
The Danish Royal Academy of Music actually has a bunch of player piano transcriptions of...who was it? My violin teacher told me (he was trained there). I think it was Rachmaninoff.
Essentially, they hooked up a player piano on record, and had him play. The result is a tape which is essentially the analog equivalent of MIDI. If you know someone in the archives and they're feeling nice, they'll still pull 'em out and put 'em in a player piano for you.
Zenph Studios, a software company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, claims that it has found a solution to the problem, although it refuses to say how for commercial reasons.
There have been attempts at music transcription software since the 1970's. For some obscure reason, many of the people who tried didn't seem to think of the fact that classical music comes with a score.
So, the "solution" to the problem is simple: use the known score to get the notes and polyphony, and use the recording primarily to infer the performance parameters. It's not a very complicated problem, actually. I suspect the main reason why you haven't seen this before is because it is of fairly little commercial interest.
Who gets the royalties?
and it's called a slot machine.
The "high def" MIDI the slashblurb refers to is probably what yamaha calls "Yamaha XP MIDI".
I can't find a technical spec on this right now, but its mostly backwards-compatible with MIDI plus the addition of a few extra details about the piano performance, e.g. key stroke depth, using the MIDI controller extensions. (However I'd be really suprised if it it was actually possible to determine key stroke depth from signal analysis of an old recording).
If they did their homework it would should also have a higher clockrate. MIDI is notorious for its poor time resolution with a clock of only 1khz -- and studies have shown that virtuoso pianists can control timing down to the sub msec range, so this is essential.
The article also beats around the bush on the polyphonic transcription issue -- but since these are classical pieces, score following seems like an obvious if not relatively easy way to do it.
With this information, it should be possible to build a robot to play the piano the way the original artist did. That would be very interesting to watch, especially if it were done over every year, and we could the robot's progression.
I can't play music, but I can hum and vocalize it. There must be software by now that will create a midi based on my voice into a microphone, right? Does anyone know what's available and how well they work?
hmmmmm
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Aww, boo hoo mister stomped sandcastle.
Go and read The Raw Feed if you want some riviting nerd repartee. NOT!
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
The Rolling Stones are on tour this summer.
I love the idea that they can transcribe polyphonic notes with such clarity. I think that being able to hear these piano masters from a real piano and not just recording would be a great experience, I wish that I could see it live.
One of the huge benefits I see is that now electronic music artists can incorporate classical pieces as done by the actual artist instead of a poor transcription. I don't know if anyone has heard tracks such as Gotti's Revenge, but I find that electronic music that integrates classical or otherwise note heavy songs has a much better sound.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
A few years ago I heard a CD made with this (or a similiar) technology.
The way the technology was described to me was as follows: as you know a piano works by having a small hammer attached to each key. The recording technology has a modified piano where below each hammer is a pool of mercury. When the key is struck the hammer enters the pool, completing an electrical circuit, this causes a line to be drawn (???) on a piece of paper. Another modified piano will read the piece of paper like a player piano.
We listened to music performed by Richard Strauss. It was very cool.
Did anyone else wonder that it seems they want to draw more attention by the "Beyond the grave" phrase than from the actual technology itself?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
dang it. I though and was hoping this article was about Brandon Heat, a former mafia hit man (and second in command basically) come back to life to kill the person that betrayed the family...
I remember one of the cool things about Scott Joplin was that he recorded his own song's player piano rolls. If you went to the store at that time and picked up a player piano rolls for one of his pieces, it was performed by him. So you were getting it exactly as he would've played it - within the parameters of what a player piano can do.
Player pianos could only record which notes were pressed and for how long. They couldn't reproduce the dynamics of the piece. MIDI is a huge step forward because you can record that nowadays.
I don't believe MIDI or anything like it will ever replace actual recordings of the music. There is just so much that happens beyond playing the notes of the song that MIDI will never be able to fully capture.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Good quality midi is difficult to distinguish from the real thing. See how good you are by trying MIDI or virtuoso
Unfortunately the you need Real Player to listen to the files.
siener's youtube channel
A recording does not contain enough information due to the mechanical limitiations of the technology to enable such a transferance of performance to occur. The dynamic range is too limited, even for just a single note, and the bandwith/resolution does not allow for a workaround. Although it might fool most people, it's NOT a *reproduction* of a performance, but a *facsimile* of one.
I hacked this together once: frequency.py but it seems to be broken now. Feel free to play around with it, meanwhile now that I know there's some interest I'll move it onto the front burner. You'll need to download some of the other modules in the src/ directory, and get Numeric Python from sourceforge.
The dead piano players recorded scratches? Where, on their coffin lids? I'm impressed by the abilities of the software to translate the performances.
he would go through several strings a month...
sounds like he really *did* take a sledgehammer to the thing!
btw; if you use a synth on a computer its pretty easy to retune MIDI into just intonation or whatever.
I used to think about the possibility of a disklavier that could retune itself automatically. Theoretically it should work... but it might not be good for the strings / frame, etc, and the piano tunerss society would probably lobby Santorum to sponser a bill to make it illegal.
To transcribe a recording, I use these magical little things called my "ears", and to play it back I use "hands".
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Yamaha Disklavier Pro
Powerful Pro MIDI Data Format Holds Expanded Performance Data
To achieve its superior recording and playback performance, the Disklavier Pro generates extra MIDI data to accommodate precision parameters. All essential data such as hammer speed, key release speed and pedaling is recorded and reproduced within the standard MIDI format, enabling full compatibility with other MIDI devices. For recording piano performances with even more subtlety and detail, you can select the expanded Yamaha XP MIDI format. This utilizes general-purpose controller numbers in the MIDI specification to record additional performance data including key speed and stroke depth, for recordings of enhanced sensitivity and precision. Multi-mode flexibility allows the Disklavier Pro to interact smoothly with existing MIDI configurations and reproduce data generated in either XP or enhanced mode, with automatic selection of the appropriate playback format.
At the BBC Proms several years ago, the long-dead pianist Percy Granger played Grieg's Piano Concerto along with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, courtesy of a piano-roll recording of his performance whose tempo was controlled live by an operator (to ensure piano and Orchestra kept together). At the time I was amazed at the subtleties of performance that the roll had captured. I had assumed (knowing next to nothing about them) that piano rolls were a crude digital version, with little or no intonation, but this was (to my poor ears) as impressive as a live performance.
Ahhh, tuning. There are subtleties there.
Fans of "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land" know that a "perfect fifth" interval has two notes, with a 3:2 ratio of frequencies. 1.5000000000000. And a major fourth interval has frequencies with a 4:3 ratio. 1.3333333333333....
Intro to music theory (or a little piano experience) notes that an octave is a doubling in frequency, and contains 12 half steps. A major fourth is five half steps, and a perfect fifth is seven. From an octave (2:1), one can compute the frequency ratio for a half step by solving for x:
x^12 = 2. I get 1.0594630943592952645618252949463
Five of these gets a frequency ratio of 1.3348398541700343648308318811823, not 4/3. A touch sharp. Seven mathematical half-steps yields a frequency ratio of 1.4983070768766814987992807320264, not 1.5. A touch flat.
A piano tuner (or the designer of any instrument) can use the mathematical equal-tempered scale, and have fourth and fifth intervals sound a bit off. Or the tuner can make some, but not all, of the fourth and fifth intervals work perfectly. Choose which ones. Make too many perfect, and the other notes will sound off, and may sound horrible in chords.
It's all about tradeoffs.
First of all, the concert is not only given by 2 dead pianists. I'm the performer of the recital. The 2 dead pianists are present during the middle of the recital where we will demo this new technology.
For all of you who has reservations about the results, i suggest that you come and hear the demo. This is not about getting a piece of music performed the way a composer wants it performed. It is also not about taking an old recording and "cleaning it up". What this technology will do, is completely recreate the original performance. And before we can legitimately question the accuracy of this re-performance, we need to look at the chain that constitutes a recording. In the original recording session, there are the following variables:
1. The performer, who is playing the piece on a piano whichever way they preferred.
2. The actual acoustic recording, going from mics to preamps to tape/dat/cylinder/whatever the method maybe.
3. The acoustics of the hall, room, space that the recording is taking place in.
In the re-performance cycle, there are the following variables:
1.Deciphering the original performance from the other variables, such as recording noise, reverb, out-of-tune notes, etc. However, the original performance's qualities to be preserved include nuances of tone, minute timing changes for every single note, loudness of every single note, pedal usage (including different gradations of pedal), and many other things.
2.Playing back this "essence" of the performance on a Yamaha Disklavier Pro.
3.Accurately matching the Yamaha Disklavier to the sound and tone qualities of the piano used in a recording, and adding whatever acoustic ambience variations to the performance (space, hall, room, etc).
The purpose of the re-performance is to throw out all of the variables during the recording, except for the performer. The ability of the Yamaha disklavier pro to reproduce this is not to be questioned - When it is accurately calibrated, I cannot tell the difference between my own performance and a played back version. In fact, if I were to acoustically record my own performances, and the played-back performances of the Disklavier, i would not be able to distinguish between the two (with a few minor exceptions, at least as far as the Mark III pro is concerned).
What this means, is that there are 2 variables still to be controlled in the playback cycle. The piano and the acoustics, and the actual "decoding" of the performance. The demonstration on May 19th will be about the decoding. All of the other variables, save the piano matching, has been take care of.
It is an amazing piece of technology, and I say this as someone who has critiqued the process every step of the way, and has seen the results firsthand, multiple times. Come on out, enjoy the recital, and see the tech demo. Mei-Ting Sun
First of all, the concert is not only given by 2 dead pianists. I'm the performer of the recital. The 2 dead pianists are present during the middle of the recital where we will demo this new technology.
For all of you who has reservations about the results, i suggest that you come and hear the demo. This is not about getting a piece of music performed the way a composer wants it performed. It is also not about taking an old recording and "cleaning it up". What this technology will do, is completely recreate the original performance. And before we can legitimately question the accuracy of this re-performance, we need to look at the chain that constitutes a recording. In the original recording session, there are the following variables:
1. The performer, who is playing the piece on a piano whichever way they preferred.
2. The actual acoustic recording, going from mics to preamps to tape/dat/cylinder/whatever the method maybe.
3. The acoustics of the hall, room, space that the recording is taking place in.
In the re-performance cycle, there are the following variables:
1. Deciphering the original performance from the other variables, such as recording noise, reverb, out-of-tune notes, etc. However, the original performance's qualities to be preserved include nuances of tone, minute timing changes for every single note, loudness of every single note, pedal usage (including different gradations of pedal), and many other things.
2. Playing back this "essence" of the performance on a Yamaha Disklavier Pro.
3. Accurately matching the Yamaha Disklavier Pro to the sound and tone qualities of the piano used in a recording, and adding whatever acoustic ambience variations to the performance (space, hall, room, etc).
The purpose of the re-performance is to throw out all of the variables during the recording, except for the performer. The ability of the Yamaha Disklavier Pro to reproduce this is not to be questioned - When it is accurately calibrated, I cannot tell the difference between my own performance and a played back version. In fact, if I were to acoustically record my own performances, and the played-back performances of the Disklavier Pro, i would not be able to distinguish between the two (with a few minor exceptions, at least as far as the Mark III Pro is concerned).
What this means, is that there are 2 variables still to be controlled in the playback cycle. The piano and the acoustics, and the actual "decoding" of the performance. The demonstration on May 19th will be about the decoding. All of the other variables, save the piano matching, has been take care of.
It is an amazing piece of technology, and I say this as someone who has critiqued the process every step of the way, and has seen the results firsthand, multiple times. Come on out, enjoy the recital, and see the tech demo.
Mei-Ting Sun
Especially Glenn Gould - the sleeve notes I have for the Glenn Gould 48 emphasise how particular he was about tuning and how he attempted to modify a particular Steinway to produce the sound he wanted - somewhere between a harpsichord and piano - such that some pieces recorded sounded so poor that the takes could not be released and had to be composited. Gould would be interesting to hear in any event - they'd have to dub in the humming :)
Close to us here is a mechanical music museum which plays origianl Gershwin recordings on a special player piano. Apparently, at one point there were only about 12 recording mechanical pianos world-wide.