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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."

4 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

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  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.

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  3. 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.

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