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iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax
holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."
That is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing.
"The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB"
Hint: In summaries, you should generally state what an acronym stands for, unless it is well understood by the vast majority of the intended audience. When in doubt, spell it out.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...Hayden other recordings. I say, Bach to the source to find out what is going on! I won't be Chopin at I-Tunes anymore.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
I can see the CDs being rips, but didn't she play publicly? Be kinda hard to fake that :)
As for the husband, either he recorded her playing in a studio, or he didn't. I don't see how you can mistake that and claim "I dunno how this happened."
Basically he's been busted and he's lying to save his ass.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I guess that wasn't a Hatto(ri) Hanzo piece after all!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This isn't specific to iTunes at all. There are lots of players and applications that take advantage of CDDB. The first impression you get from the article is that Apple somehow managed to catch a fraud, while that isn't the truth at all.
do you know squarepusher?
...that there would be a Milli Vanilli in the classical world.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
and I've never heard of her... but then again, there are a ton of pianists out there.
Sounds like her husband was no stranger to Pro Tools...
No matter how well known a classical musician is, there will not be 1/40th the amount of recording sales that your average pop "artist" generates on a given album. Remember Milli Vanilli?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I love when things like this come out after the guilty party has passed on. Holding up a scam with your very last breath takes dedication, and the mental image of Ms Hatto laughing pleasantly and flipping sweary fingwer gestures from the great beyond comforts me immensely.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Stealing from the dead is a very old tradition. As is having them cast votes, collect pensions et al... No respect for the old ways anymore...
So if her recordings were so masterful, and they were identical to other recordings, then why didn't the critics recognize the similarity for so long?
This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.
"iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax"
It's become self-aware!!
http://www.concertartistrecordings.com/
at least show your appreciation for the label's practices by visiting them on the web!
Frankly, I blame the RIAA for going after her remixes. Talk about a vendetta. A proper Slashdot comment would rattle on about how these poor folks are suing a dead woman.
Really, the two of them were the biggest fans of the artists whose work they fair-used. They did this as an homage. Yeah. That's the ticket.
heh.
is simplified by the fact that it's solo piano. Unlike solo string works, intonation is not a distinguishing characteristic for solo piano. And anyway, the musical content is the same for the pieces.
Also, there must be thousands of recordings of the transcendental etudes (I have several in my cd case, alone) spanning probably 100 years or so. Classical musicians often listen to recordings of the piece they're working on to get ideas on interpretation.
Imagine if you had thousands of bands playing the same song, and using the same instrumentation - I'm willing to bet I could copy one of the renditions... change the mp3 info, and no one would notice the duplicate. It's not that amazing of a story, really. I suspect her husband told her that he would touch up her recordings to make them sound better. I doubt she wanted this, but who knows? Anyway, it sounds like a few minutes work on pro tools or some other DAW. Heck, Audacity would suffice for this sort of thing, I would imagine.
Sorry. I had to. :)
This should have been the quote from her husband:
"It makes me laugh," he said. "The part I don't understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don't know him from a can of paint. I'm 15 years deep. That's how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, 'You can't be serious.' "
How are we supposed to RTFA when we dont know what "RTFA" stands for?
Best "dept." ever.
Also, the story is pretty funny.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
What gets me is that some of the recordings were with an orchestra. "The mysterious René Kohler and the National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra"
How is it that you fake a whole orchestra, make up a conductor and nobody notices???
Apparently nobody cared and the only reason they care now is that it's a scandel.
from the newscientist article: "To identify albums it calculates a 'discid' from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online."
From the scientific analysis: "for ten of the twelve tracks on this CD." "Simon recording has been time-shrunk by 0.02%" and "Nojima time-stretched by 0.975%"
Ok, seems to me that the discid is calculated using ALL of the tracks, and yet not all of the tracks were from the same source - So how did the exact CD she ripped from get ID'd?
Also, the time-stretching should have effected the durations, and generated different IDs. For example, the track she supposedly stole from Nojima: the duration of her track was 3'33", meaning that with 0.975% time-stretching the original must have been 3'38". Assuming digital hashing is involved in creating the discid, this should be more than enough of a difference to create a substantially different id.
I'm not saying that iTunes didn't uncover the difference, and I'm not claiming she didn't fake it, but... I seriously doubt that all the information here about how discid's are calculated/obtained is 100% correct. Anyone know more info about how this works, or how iTunes could still have uncovered the fraud?
Compact Disk Database, Bitch
As she appears to have copied and sold music without the proper licenses, the RIAA will be hunting here down. Merely being Dead will not stop the RIAA from making your existence a living hell.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
but I would have liked to see waveforms of a third performer playing the same piece, just to see what the natural range of variation in classical music is.
Careful with your adjectives there - it's a hoax about music, so it's a "music hoax". The hoax itself doesn't have a melody or harmony, lyrics or refrains. I.e., it's not "musical".
;-)
And if it were, it wouldn't have really been performed by Joyce Hatto.
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
I am wandering how many "stolen" novels/poems/essays will be uncovered once the Google Library is completed, and who will appear on the blacklist...
The CDDB was coded as a free repository of CD metadata. Collected by thousands of people around the Net on a worldwide, ongoing basis, by giving away the client SW which many programmers embedded into PC/Mac music players. So millions of people were prompted every time they put in an unknown CD to spend a few seconds typing in artist and song names. In exchange (though no input was required), they got most of their CDs labeled without any effort, after the CDDB was filled.
This kind of read/write database population collaboration is now well known, both in blogs and in more sophisticated databases like Wikipedia. But in the late 1990s it was revolutionary.
Then the CDDB server owners sold out to Gracenote. Gracenote required a login to access the data, which login they supplied only to licensed users. Gracenote first tried to sell CD players integrated with the CDDB, but then found more success in licensing access to iTunes and other online music distributors.
But neither Gracenote nor the CDDB programmers had produced the profitable data. The people who had were locked out. So some new programmers made a new version with the identical API and DB structure, the FreeDB, then datamined the CDDB to populate it. The FreeDB and its contents are GPL, so they cannot be "taken proprietary" (stolen) again. The data is free again, as is the life of this pioneering colalborative project.
If you are generating music metadata, consider submitting it to the FreeDB. And try to use the FreeDB, rather than the privateer CDDB, to support you applications. And send money to the FreeDB operators whenever you can, especially if you use it.
--
make install -not war
Not much chance getting away with calling a Glenn Gould recording your own.
Streaming interview : Mark Lawson interviews a journalist from Gramaphone magazine (one of Joyce Hatto's champions) and talks about the issue in general, with semi-amusing lack of tech-spertise. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/radio4/aod .shtml?radio4/frontrow_mon#
FreeDB is a lesson in misspelling, inconsistency, and duplication.
I have, twice, seen CD's of entirely my own work, match the checksums of others when queried via CDDB.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Thank God, for a second I thought it was just another Tool Without An Interesting Name.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The CDDB and Free-db catalogs work by comparing the length of each song. If your CD has two tracks, the first 36:24 and the second 36:42, it looks for a record with two tracks, the first being 36:24 and the second 36:42*.
This is readily apparent when you have a CD with only one track. I go to Mike's to sample albums, and since EAC doesn't like his burner, I'll burn the whole album as a single track on the software that came with his Dell and work on it at home. Very often CDDB (or rather, the "open source" version free-db which is what all good nerds should use) will tag (say) a copy of Lynard Skynard's Second Helping as a speech by some politician.
My turntable is a teensy bit off; my ripped copy Pink Floyd's The Wall is about twenty seconds longer than what it says on the album cover. I almost never get an accurate free-db match with a CD sampled from an LP, but quite frequently get a match (or often a series of "possible matches" that are all the same album) with one made from cassette.
*: Those of you who are both Douglas Adams and Playboy Magazine fans will figure out why I chose those lengths for the fictitious CD
This is not really a hoax. The CDDB is open and can be contributed to by anyone. This is about as newsworthy as an inaccurate article on wikipedia.
Which is a great reason to look at MusicBrainz.
So this isn't a story about the Beadle's About theme tune. How disappointing.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
The perpetrator of this fraud (presumably, her husband, who produced the albums) should have hired a two-bit geek to help him. I can't think of anything easier than at the very minimum retracking the forgery to avoid such an obvious pitfall.
Well, I guess it just reinforces the basic issue with the vast majority of crooks: if they aren't smart enough to make it within the law, then they probably aren't smart enough to be a good crook either.
Somehow this is going to convince record executives that we need stronger DRM.
There are waveforms of third party performers.
Infuriate left and right
The whole Hatto hoax is an internet phenomenon, specifically a usenet phenomenon. Hadn't there been two shills on the group, playing good cop, bad cop and drawing other bystanders into the game, this would not have happened.
Before those Hatto recordings were on the radar of the professional reviewing magazines in the UK, the entire promotion for these CDs was done on rec.music.classical recordings by the two shills and on the website of a CD retailer with a close affiliation to the record producers. People were praising the CDs into the sky and the exclusive retailer is a regular on the newsgroup, too.
This thing had SCAM written all over it, but overcoming groupthink in the presence of two shills is difficult. Godwin's law,you know.
It's hilarious to see the two shills in action: The one is a loud, foulmouthed ex-classical-music-producer from Canada and the other one an English gentleman with impeccable style, manners and a deep love for classical music. What they staged was drama on a very high level, flaming residents into the ground at the slightest hint of a suspicion as to the authenticity of the recordings. Anything from Jew to Nazi was good enough to be hurled at the detractors of the holy trinity of Hatto, Barrington-Coup and Music.
They almost murdered me when I told the group that the whole thing was a total fake, based on all the oddities that I named.
From the Wikipedia entry on Hatto: "...Barrington-Coupe denied any wrongdoing and said he would ask his own sound engineer to compare the recordings."
When told to turn over the White House tapes, Nixon carefully reassured investigators that he had gone over the tapes personally and had found nothing incriminating.
Hey, wait a minute, there's an unexpended acronym there!
Stack overflow. Core dumped.
(IANAL)
I don't quite follow how this is supposed to work. CDDB calculates a hash based on the CD/track lengths. Even the the New Scientist article mentions this. For a CD to be misidentified, it would have to have the same number and lengths of tracks.
Now the article goes on to say that the recordings have been time-shifted (by up to 15%) which makes me wonder, how could it POSSIBLY confuse the fake CD with the original CD? A tool that collects wave samples and tries to find similar sounding songs could do it, sure, but that's not what CDDB does.
Is the track listing of the original/fake exactly the same? Is this just a fortunate hash collision? The iTunes part just doesn't add up for me.
I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses. - Thus spoke RMS, may he be blessed
/.ers what's the issue here? So she (or her husband) said it was hers... big deal... everyone got some enjoyment from the piece.
So, a recording of a delightful piece of music that many people obviously enjoy would fall under this statement.
1) It was not iTunes that uncovered any alleged hoax! It was CCDB (if at all)!
2) I guess that any info provided via the vaunted iTunes product must be suspect as well.
... of running the country into the ground with long-debunked pre-Depression economic policies and hypocritical attempts to turn Conservative Christian values into law.
You forgot a few characters.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
As far as I know, CDDB is based simply on matching the sequence and length of the tracks on the disk, with some fuzz factors so that the match doesn't have to be perfect. I find it simply amazing that CDDB works.
I've personally experienced the shock of inserting a CD that I copied from an LP and having CDDB identify it (because there was a CD version of the same album), particularly impressive since there was often a second or two difference in the lengths of my tracks and the CD tracks.
I believe if Hatto's husband hadn't copied the contents of entire CDs as a whole, but had mixed up the track order or combined different albums, the fraud might have escaped detection by CDDB. (Of course, a sufficiently bizarre track order might have raised suspicions of its own)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If any independent research was done that shows the critic used iTunes then I have no problem, but New Scientist doesn't indicate that they did anything other than read the Gramophone and Pristine articles. Where the hell did they suddenly get iTunes?
Yesterday I received an email from someone who used to be a researcher at CCRMA at Stanford about this:
---
You may find interest in following the discovery of a possible large-scale hoax in classical music.
I have been analyzing the performances of Chopin Mazurkas (http://mazurka.org.uk) and have been noticing an unusual occurence: the performances of the same two pianists always matched whenever I do an analysis for a particular mazurka. In fact, they matched as well as two different re-releases of the same original recording.
We were keeping the identity confidential due to strict libel laws in the UK and slowly building up a case. One CD set being a match could possibly be an innocent mistake, and if the record label lost business due to insinuations related to our findings... However, the story broke this past Thursday afternoon on the Gramophone website:
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?s toryID=2759&newssectionID=1
Last week, a music critic of Gramophone put a CD of Joyce Hatto's performance of the Liszt Transcedental Etudes into his CD-rom drive. The iTunes program then informed him that the pieces on the CD were correct, but the performer was different. He had that other CD and listened to both and could tell that the sounded very similar to each other. He then found using iTunes another match with Joyce Hatto playing Rachmaninov piano concertos, and again he had the original CD and could not tell a difference between them. He sent them to Pristine Audio to be analyzed by Andrew Rose, who confirmed the matches:
http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html
Andrew subsequently discovered that the Hatto performances of the Godowsky Chopin Etude Studies were also from a previously released commercial CD (although recent reports indicate that some of the tracks on the CD set are by an additional performer Marc Hamelin).
The day after the initial disclosure on the Gramophone website, CHARM (http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk) released their findings which it had been collecting on the similarities of the Chopin mazurkas, since there was no longer any legal concerns related to releasing our corroborating findings.
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_ cover.html
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_ article.html
It is interesting to note that the Mazurka performances of Joyce Hatto could not be identified by the CDDB method used by iTunes to uncover the first two matches found by the Gramophone critic. The ordering of the mazurkas had been changed on the CDs, and the mazurkas were allocated differently on the two discs so that the track counts did not match. In addition, each track was timestreched by differing amounts. In the three mazurkas that I have examined in detail, the time stretching was -0.7%, -2.8%, and +1.2%. The fact that different amounts of time stretching was applied to the separate tracks leads to juicy circumstantial conclusions. It is interesting to note that Andrew Rose discovered that the Godowsky Studies had been slowed down by an incredible 15%.
Six of Joyce Hatto's CDs have been identified as copies of existing commercial recordings (as of Sunday night): three by Gramophone/Pristine Audio; one by CHARM; one by arec.music.classical.recording contributor 12 hours after the Gramophone news (so his claim to have know earlier is most likely correct); and 1 additional matching on Sunday for a source to the Chopin Etude CD set.
Hatto's mostly complete Concert Artists discography and a list of the currently identified original sources are available on her entry in
Joyce Hatto
Joy to cheat.
Joy octet? Ha!
Imagine if it all turned out to be a shill...
There are a ton of industries that are built upon the opinion of a few "experts". The billion dollar wine industry comes to mind. The art industry. The pedigree dog industry.... Mention that it's all a ruse and you'll have dozens of rabid folks swarming down upon you.
Anyhoo - this whole thing reminds me of a Star Trek episode where Cmdr. Data plays a violin. He plays it perfectly but is criticized because it's too perfect and perfectly inhuman. There was no feeling. And it's true. There's certainly a difference between how each performer interprets a piece (or plays it to please his instructor), but sometimes I have to laugh when the industry graybeards condemn one performer and laud another even though both are as talented (or talentless as the case may be).
Just an FYI, for the general enlightenment of all: the name of the 'poor, poor pitiful me' song you hear the first few seconds of from time to time is "Hearts And Flowers".
"The records are well engineered, and she uses wonderful instruments; still, her beautiful sound is her own. Best of all is her musical imagination, which finds original things to say about the most familiar music. " Ha!
I don't get *this* (how many layers of abstraction can be go here?). If you're posting anonymously, how is your relation to the user account used for moderation activity detected? IP?
MAJOR HOAX DISCOVERED - /. ANONYMOUS POSTING NOT ANONYMOUS
If comment moderation had been the explanation used in the post, Taco would not have been involved, I think. It's possible that Slashdot is doing this, but it seems that that would take significant CPU time and would be annoying to users. Besides, changing fonts, quoted blocks, etc changes the fingerprint anyway.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
... when one of the songs was titled "Acidjazzed Evening"?
http://outcampaign.org/
ah, it's not worth the treble.
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
This whole thing reminds me of F for Fake, directed by Orson Welles, about the art forger Elmyr de Hory, who claims to have forged massive numbers of works of art by Picasso and others. The film is really interesting, a quasi-documentary or "film essay" on the nature of fakery, aesthetics, and criticism.
Sounds like it's time for a lawsuit.
And I'd like to state, if you're tooting slashdots' horn, I'm first in line.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
At one point I was ripping a large quantity of prerecorded reel-to-reel jazz tapes so that I could convert them to MP3s. During this process I was manually cutting the .AIFF files into individual tracks, ending up with a track time slightly different than that on any of the official CD rereleases. Once I completed that, I would burn the files to CD and then import them into iTunes. Somehow, 90% of the time, iTunes would correctly identify the CD title and all of its tracks, even though the track times were different than the CD reissues. Not sure how it did that.
>>you should at least be able to figure out what it STANDS for :-p
>
>Yeah? But what does "STANDS" mean?
Bill Clinton posts on Slashdot? Who knew?
Just go to the rec.music.classical.recordings and read some of the discussions. There is some authority by the name Deacon who apparently was tremendously excited over Hatto, and then outright rejected any idea that it was a fake (he said he didn't trust the guy who compared the WAV file - that guy was a sound engineer at BBC!). He Mr. Deacon has to eat the crow.
Now what would be _really_ interesting is to check out the reviews of Hatto's music compared to reviews of the original recordings. :)
If we could just find a reviewer who loved Hatto's version but not the original..
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
For a couple of years you've been able to use applications that create mathematical models of music with applications like I Eat Brainz (Mac OSX) and MusicBrainz (Windows); they create a pattern and use that to search for and identify the music. Since the pattern can account for things like slight differences in speed, my guess is they used those apps or similar (the database is important and takes time to build, so perhaps they did use the Brainz database) to confirm their suspicions, if not to identify the similarities in the first place.
That's not to say Gracenote or CDDB or iTunes did not play a role: they too are good at cataloging music in a different way than 'Brainz, which is a useful feature when you are trying to confirm your suspicions. Normally you use both to manually enter the metadata for those "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album" songs that creep into the hard drive over time.
In this case, used together they could probably make a very convincing case: the patterns are not easily fooled; two sessions of the same song by the same artist appearing on two CDs (for example) can be identified as either unique or identical.
Can we all agree that POS stands for Piece of Shit and not Point of Sale?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You just named one of the greatest piano players of the XXth century.
Allow me to stand as a mark od respect.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've noticed on dozens of occasions CDDB not working correctly. I'd burn a CD (usually just 1 track of my 100% original music) at work and bring it home, and CDDB would display it as things like "Jennifer Lopez" or some language that I don't understand. I'm not sure what this means for this particular case of fraud, but I'm sure there could be more going on here.
.... can you please find us the place where it sees that you lost attribution for your own work when it is distributed under a free licence?
In order to troll successfully your claims have to past a basic lithmus test of credibility....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.