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iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax

Posted by kdawson on from the man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-Hatto dept.

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."

12 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. live performances? by tomstdenis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:live performances? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I don't see the point in fraud

      1. Produce fraudulent recordings
      2. ????
      3. Profit!

    2. Re:live performances? by naoursla · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It just isn't funny when there is an obvious path to profit. The whole running gag came about from gnomes stealing underpants in pursuit of profit. It was a social comment on all of the dot coms of the day holding to blind faith that what they were doing would lead to profit. Applying the joke to fraud is like.. oh I don't know... talking about gross pictures and then linking to goatse.

    3. Re:live performances? by delinear · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's meant to play on the still pretty much widely held-to stereotype of the typical geek. The fact that most of us are in successful, long term relationships just adds to the irony of the stereotype. Therein (still) lies the funny.

  2. Why iTunes? by govtpiggy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:Why iTunes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      iTunes didn't catch it, CDDB did.

      This is the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes coming to down and solving a previously unsolved crime - and the townspeople congratulating the horse that drew the carriage.

  3. Come on now by Bullfish · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  4. Blind music critics? by pherthyl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Blind music critics? by nahdude812 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      According to the article it's because they made subtle variations to the pieces, including changing the tempo by less than 1% (so they wouldn't sync up), changing the balance (so the center was different), and changing the equalizer (so it sounded like a different piano).

      These are people playing the same music, there are only so many things you can do to detect fakes, and I also doubt that anyone was looking for them before now. It'd be like detecting a brightness, contrast, color adjusted, and cropped version of a photo from thousands of photos against the same scene when you had no expectation that there even was a dupe.

      --
      Slay a dragon... over lunch!
    2. Re:Blind music critics? by crabpeople · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unfortunately no torrent. Destined to remain obscure I guess.

      --
      I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
  5. this sort of abuse... by rivaldufus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Glenn Gould is still safe by joe_n_bloe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not much chance getting away with calling a Glenn Gould recording your own.