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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.
...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.
...this is /.
The majority understand what CDDB is...if nothing else, you should at least be able to figure out what it STANDS for. Just to help you out, I'll break it down for you:
CD. DB.
Need further assistance?
Living With a Nerd
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?
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...
Yeah? But what does "STANDS" mean?
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!!
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.
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.
STANDS: Some Theoretical Acronym Not Described Sufficiently?
How are we supposed to RTFA when we dont know what "RTFA" stands for?
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?
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.
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#
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.
Which is a great reason to look at MusicBrainz.
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.
The first CD discovered and compared only had very limited time shifts - as little as 0.2% - and seems to have been close enough to not confuse the CDDB.
After the first CD, the investigators went out looking for older recordings to match. In these they found some with shifts as high as 15%. CDDB was no longer being used as an analysis tool; they were directly comparing the sampled data from the two sources, adjusting the time shifts until the measured aligned.
The other group that found a match (linked on page 5 or so of the article) has a musical comparison technique that they claim is based on relative timing, so they could compare without first making any adjustments.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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
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
I heard it as "Technology Without An Interesting Name", but I also heard that they're all just backronyms, and it was really from Kipling's "...and never the twain shall meet", referring to the disparity between interface designers and driver programmers.
Wikipedia agrees with me, but also confirms Toolkit is the most correct expansion (although Important instead of Interesting).