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Broadway Musicians Replaced With Synthesizers
wooferhound writes "Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they're especially popular with provincial or touring companies. But until mid-July — when 'West Side Story's' producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra's string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend. There are computer programs able to read and play back music scores — a boon to composers who can now hear their work as they write — and software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players."
Replaced by my fp
...until the Rocky Horror Show is completely synthesized and performed by robots with buggy participation.
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What is the issue here?
We automate lots of other work, why not this?
Oh noes, someone is no longer going to be doing a repetitive job better done by a machine, truly the end of the world.
Why where they not already using recordings was my first question when I saw this article.
Sucks to be outsourced, sorry to hear it.
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What would be the difference between having a synth play this live, or simply a recording of a synth playing during a live performance? The one question I would ask is: Did replacing actual musicians make the ticket prices go down?
A: Probably not. Profits will be up though!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players.
I did something like this with an Apple IIe in the early days of MIDI in a scene where an actor had to fake playing the piano faster and faster as the scene progressed. Up in the booth I tapped up the tempo following the actor, rather than have the actor have to follow a recording.
What's amazing about Broadway is that it has held out so long. In large part that's due to unions, but I think also audience expectations. One isn't surprised a low budget production in the boonies would cut corners, but if you shell out for a Broadway ticket, you want the full meal.
Loose lips lose spit.
The Jets designated geeks will sit in front of the stage controlling the music on Windows PCs during their musical numbers, while the Sharks use MacBooks.
The media industry makes so much noise about what they call "piracy" supposedly causing artists to starve, how can they allow this automation to happen?
After all, a live performance is much harder to "steal". The only way I can imagine of doing it would be drilling holes in the theater wall to let people watch from the outside without paying.
Automating musicians' jobs takes away one sure way they have to earn a living.
Reminds me of the early 1900s, when live orchestras would play during silent movies. Along came recorded movie sound, and thus pre-recorded musical scores to accompany them, and the musicians protested this invasion and the loss of their jobs. I was trying to find an entry about it on the Paleo Future blog, can't seem to.
I for one find this tragic. Music in general has been in decline. Record companies have made music about everything but music. Now people like Madonna and Lady Gaga are musicians, but people are more likely to notice what they're wearing before they notice anything about the music. Now that they've made recorded music and concerts so banal, they only have musicals and orchestras left to attack.
As someone who has played an instrument, I find it pretty cool that they are able to get a machine to read music... It was only a matter of time though. What is music? Fractions and frequencies. Something a computer should be able to handle.
What I haven't heard is a really good synthesizer. My God, Have you heard CATS? That shit sounds like it was done on the Casio the kids have in their bedroom.
In the long run though, this should make the "ARTS" more accessible to the public. I find that to be a good thing.
If you play a recording you have to pay to the recording copyright's owner.
If you play from the original score you have to pay to the score copyright's owner.
Perhaps the second means a lower cost than the first.
There is a major difference. The big moment that happens at 93:27:34 in the movie will always happen at 93:27:34. There is no such dependability in live performance.
I've made a few paychecks as a pit musician and I can't imagine how the synths will be controlled. If it is a person at a keyboard with a super advanced tone module then you are really just replacing a few musicians with a single one, not exactly groundbreaking, and it's frequently done with a standard piano covering parts that can't be hired (your local production of Fiddler on the Roof likely has a piano covering the accordion part).
If this is a computer, like the one FTFA that is mentioned to keep crashing, well, I can't see this actually being ok for any real performance where people are paying money. Crashing is one thing, but even if the program works perfectly, now everything has to cue off the computer. What if someone is late on an entrance? What if there is a technical problem? What if an actor drops a couple lines? An entire verse? There is a very delicate interplay between the actors, the stage manager, the conductor and the musicians to make everything match up every time. It's why opera is, for my money, the most stressful job I have ever taken as a musician.
What would be the difference between having a synth play this live, or simply a recording of a synth playing during a live performance?
Read the summary. The synth handles tempo changes far better.
The problem is: It's not repetitive. Time in a production is not kept strict. Actors botch things all the time. Now, if you were able to automate the actors, the stage manager, the run crew, the lighting and probably the audience as well, then the automated music will work perfectly.
>There are computer programs able to read and play >back music scores Did they just discover MIDI??
Much of the move away from live instruments to computers (especially in things like TV soundtracks) is the result of modern computing, storage, and sampling. Rather than trying to simulate the sound of a piano, you can painstakingly sample each note at multiple velocities. Depending on the desired complexity, the samples easily reach into the gigabytes for a single instrument. Yet the end result is a digital piano that's incredibly realistic; recording a real piano live better than a good sample is becoming more and more difficult. A "live" piano in person will still sound better than most speaker setups, but for recorded music sampling is really impressive.
The line between traditional and electric, analog and digital continues to blur. Rather than an analog guitar amp, it's easy to have software with a number of digital amps to provide any number of sounds.
Overall I think the benefits vastly outweigh the loss of more traditional music playing. As TFS says, modern computing allows composers to have an incredible array of instruments at their disposal. It's easier and cheaper than ever to create really interesting music of all genres, making the key constraints the right ones - training, practice, and talent.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Example: J.S. Bach didn't hide from the newly invented piano and cry "Ach, mein Gott, give me mein harpsichord and save me from the barbarian pianoforte". No, Bach took the piano and made it his bitch. Ditto for Telemann and the keyed flute.
And remember, electronic instruments have been part of classical music since the 1930's and Edgard Varèse.
If you want to hold back the evolution of musical instruments, then you might as well throw away your violin and go back to banging sticks and stones together.
sound systems circa 1962, midi circa 1982, protools 1990-ish. They've had machines to do that for a while.
"first they came for the rhythm sections, but as I did not play bass ..."
signed,
a still sometimes working musician
ps: File sharing screwed the lawyers, not the players. Won't someone think of the lawyers ... sob ...
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
In the year 105105
If man is still alive
If robot can survive
They may find
In the year 252525
The backwards time machine still won't have arrived
In all the world, there's only one technology:
A rusty sword for practicing proctology
In a future year that ends in a 20
A schlubby merman will come and try to get chummy
He may look like a watery wimp
When in fact, he's a bloodthirsty shrimp
In the year one million and a half
Humankind is enslaved by giraffe
Men must pay for all his misdeeds
When the treetops are stripped of their leaves
The Vienna Symphony Library is available today and can essentially replace an orchestra to all but the most discerning of ears. Here is an example of the E.T. theme. There are a couple of parts where I can tell it's a bit artificial sounding if I really listen, but it's approaching the flawless threshold.
That said, there is a particular order of ease of simulation: percussion (including piano), strings, brass and woodwinds. The latter two are notoriously difficult to emulate because they are so closely tied to non-discrete complex forms of movement of the mouth (articulation). For example, see this demo of one of the betters saxophone emulators - still something missing even to uneducated ears, but not too bad in a mix. Strings can also be difficult to emulate, but if apps from companies like Prominy are coming out, guitars and violins, this is getting scary.
There are a couple of serious implications of this. First and foremost is what the value of a live performance is with and without musicians, which the linked article addresses. The second is decreasing numbers of people willing to learn these instruments. For a lot of folks who compose for small-budget TV and movies and can't afford musicians, it's a great way to go. Nevertheless, it's the same cautionary tale as the decline in handwriting that coincided with the rise of computers with keyboards. You can't replace handwriting in a lot of circumstances.
What's the point of replacing live musicians with a synthesizer? WHy not just use a backing tape which sounds exactly the same? Maybe because it points out that the stage performance could also get great savings, by being played from film...
POKE 36879,8
But you will never replace our homosexuals.
Not until you get the mincing right.
There is only one thing about this that seems wrong, apparently customers who buy tickets are not aware that the music they are listening to is played by computers. The rest is usual RUR like nonsense.
Sarah Franklin, a talented 24-year-old violinist, joined a five-month North America tour for a revival of the musical "Camelot" with an orchestra of just four people.
"There was me on the violin, one cello, one French horn and a conductor with a computer," she said. The computer, using a software called Notion, played the rest of the semi-virtual orchestra.
Frequently the program crashed, abruptly leaving the three live musicians to play by themselves. But despite the glitches, most audience members were none the wiser, Franklin said.
"When people saw us down in the pit afterwards, they'd say, 'It sounded like there were so many more of you!'"
The musicians would wriggle out of the embarrassing situation by pretending that the rest of their colleagues had quickly left the theater.
"We got fed up with explaining and we didn't want to ruin it for them. They didn't need to know," Franklin said.
- This looks to me like false advertising. If people came to listen to live music they paid for the tickets accordingly. Maybe the musicians need to take a pay cut (I honestly don't know how much a violin player makes) but the bosses here seem to run a fake business. Maybe ticket prices also need to come down since the show is different.
True aficionados can immediately tell the difference between real and manufactured music.
- the difference would be not in the music notes, but in the vibrations of the air, unless the acoustics can repeat the same vibrations that actual instruments make. Then again, in the future the computers can control robots, who then could play actual instruments. Not like it didn't happen before.
Woodiel compares playing alongside a synthesizer to "making love with a corpse."
- a cheap one too, right ?:)
Even Smith readily concedes that today's virtual instruments cannot match live string players "by a long shot."
But advocates argue that axing salaried musicians in favor of a machine during today's economic uncertainty can extend the life of a flagging production, thereby saving many other jobs.
- how about informing the customers that this is happening and reducing the ticket prices accordingly? Also just maybe it is possible to retain human musicians at reduced dollar rates?
You can't handle the truth.
This is nothing new. This has been happening since the late 90s when I started playing shows. It can work if done right. I think the best way to do it is to have at least ONE real instrument and then have a synth doing the parts underneath.
In fact, the show I'm starting next week we have one violin viola and cello and someone playing a synth to fill up the section. Sounds ok.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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Wonderful. How many more years until there are no more musicians and actors and writers and anyone else artistic anymore - just a bunch of computer programs spitting out content for the humans toiling in the underground sugar caves?
'I didn't get the part!'
'Who did?'
'Nobody! They gave it to Harrison Ford!'
'Didn't he die like 50 years ago?'
This really just sounds like the conductors are turning into handsomely paid DJ's. Are they replacing the conductor's wand with a Wii remote, so the strings know what to do, and the conductor doesn't look like a keyboardist / DJ from your favorite hip-hop band? As long as they're advertising the fact it isn't a complete live playing of the music, I have no issues with it. But advertise the fact. If I want a recording, I'll pay $20 for it. If I want to actually hear the artist, and the local orchestra play, well I'll pay for that privilege in the ticket price.
Sounds old fashioned to me. Shouldn't that be a PC with a high quality D/A converter aka sound card (or a few) these days?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If there is no performer, that is it is all synthesized, then there is, in fact, no real purpose for the performance at all.
I think that the trend being reported here is nothing more than a passing fad. In the long term, I cannot see this technology being practical anywhere outside of a closed recording studio, where only the music itself matters and the skill behind the performance is not actually meant to be directly appreciated.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
these instruments if they cannot be heard in live settings or by film or audio recordings?
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I do declare this comment to be very authentic. I write now while drinking coffee. I insert reference http:/// and get modded up.
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I like to toy around with music in my free time. I'm not very good, I'll never be able to make a career out of it, nor would I even want to. I want to hear what I mess with, and want to hear it as though good musicians were doing it. Problem is that being nothing but a hobbyist, I can't really afford to go hiring out a symphony. What to do?
Buy EastWest samples, that's what. For several hundred dollars, my computer can give sound that is pretty damn close to real players. Now I can have fun at home, and it is something I can afford to do. What's more, if I had the skill to make something that people wanted, I could do so, record it (or more correctly bounce it down to two tracks) and distribute it. I could produce from my home, needing nothing but my system.
Stuff like this, quality samples, cheap HD cameras, good 3D software, etc are great equalizers in terms of media production. You don't have to be well funded, backed by major players to create something high quality. You can be some guy, or a few friends, with a little bit of money and a lot of talent and can create something for everyone to enjoy.
The point of many early synthesizers was to recreate real instruments. The Rhodes Electric Piano had the goal of sounding like a piano, but not weighing north of a thousand pounds. Well it did not sound real, there was no mistaking it for a real grand, though it did have a piano like sound in some ways.
However now we have the capability to get real piano sound. a high quality sample set on a modern computer can come so close as to make no real odds to an actual piano. As such a laptop plus a good MIDI keyboard is all you need to take a piano, actually more than one, on the road. So, the Rhodes is dead right? Not hardly. People discovered that they rather like the sound. It is a neat instrument in its own right. As such you can also get samples of it. Your computer that can perfectly recreate a Bosendorfer Imperal 290 can also perfectly recreate a Rhodes EP-1.
Kraftwerk has been inspiring to this since the seventies.
I want to hear the sound of the bow on the string. I want to hear the difference between individual performances. Heck I even forgive clams and wrong notes.
What we now have is not art it is synthetic swill produced for the masses and will not stand the test of time. If we cannot afford real musicians then the art will become cheapened to the point of meaningless twaddle by untalented musically illiterate bean counters.
that is, if you are purposefully going to watch live people do what is usually projected onto a screen, then you are already paying a premium for a quaint, thrilling pasttime
to then sully that quaint experience with the same intrusions of modern technology you are actively fleeing, you are negating the whole point of seeking out the quaint experience in the first place
so broadway should realize, and if they don't then they will find out, that people want a broadway experience. they pay a premium for a boradway experience. full stop. that means live people cranking on curtains, live people turning lights on and off, and live people blowing into wind instruments
so if you pollute the "purity" of that quaint experience, you also destroy that which makes the experience attractive in the first place
broadway, whatever money it is saving on not having an orchestra, is losing money by cheapening the experience and how much people are thrilled by and therefore will pay for the experience
synthesizers instead of live musicians simply means less money for broadway, not cost savings. someone must see that they are cheapening their product and reducing its appeal
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Music has been getting murdered since about 1890 when things like record players, radio and the microphone started killing off big bands, orchestras and neighborhood bands. Tin Pan Alley was killed off and was the supplier of sheet music for America. Families no longer played music on most porches and the piano became more and more rare in living rooms.
Now we are seeing something even worse. And there will be repercussions. School bands already suffer and you can bet that kids will not want to learn instruments when machines displace pro players. And who will be left standing to build pro quality instruments when sales are killed off by robots-computers that can play any tune as well. Right now it is painful and expensive to purchase a pro quality tuba, or other brass horn. People spend many thousands to acquire a pro quality clarinet or flute. If sales volumes fall off these instruments will go through the roof in price. And those that make CDs or DVDs or allow their music to be on TV are certain to have it duplicated by these new devices so the recording industry is pretty much out of luck as well.
But the worst part is the social aspect being destroyed. Communities and families were often held tightly together by the creation of music. What replaces that? I already own computer programs that will create, play and print good music from all of the instruments in combination. That means I need no one to produce tunes. It is a sad state of affairs.
I am both a musician and a geek and I've been there - i do my arranging and the playback from an arranging program (Finale/Sibelius) is pretty sophisticated these days. Software + synth will replace an average performance pretty well, but a great performance is great because it pushes the limits of the players and the environment. A great performance requires great individual performances and will be on the risky side. Typically a great performance (I've occasionally been lucky and been there, great performances are very rare) works this way: you are playing along and someone, perhaps the conductor, perhaps not, makes a proposal: "Lets go for it on this one"" and plays a stunningly great phrase. The proposal is answered by another wonderful phrase, and from then on to the end (if it goes right) everybody is concentrating at a rare level. I've occasionally heard performances that start great & finish ordinary, too. Want a couple of examples? These are from the classical area but I've heard it happen in jazz too. Try: Leonard Bernstein+NY Phil, Mahler Symphony #2, the version with Lee Venora singing. The brass playing is superb too. Same conductor & orchestra, Sibelius Symphony #2, The great phrase is the oboe solo. What we have now is software that gives us the most of the nuances and produces a polished copy of a fine performance. I can imagine software that would give us true greatness but not any time soon.
Avatar uses real human actors and capture their action as well as facial expression and emotion, and then use that as the basis to synthesize a performance. Notion3 is actually similar but the motion/emotion capturing is much more primitive. The live performance mode in Notion3 allows a conductor---or a technician following a conductor---to use just one key on a MIDI keyboard to play a score. The MIDI keyboard captures the dynamics by recording key velocity as well as tempo. They then use that information to synthesize a performance based on audio samples recorded from London Symphony Orchestra.
While Avatar probably wouldn't be successful if they only had one person play all characters, the success of Notion3 where one person plays the whole orchestra is kind of interesting. It shows that when you're part of an orchestra ensemble, the amount of individual character you contribute to the group is negligible. This would probably motivate more musicians to pursue a solo career, or inspire a music genre where all the instrument pieces are part of a dialogue rather than just playing in unison.
I once had a signature.
This is just simulacrum order 2, at least make it 4th order simulacra.
I have a problem with this. At least, as I've always understood it, Broadway shows were lives shows. Which should include the musicians.
So they replace a few live players. Next season you lose the piano, then you lose the cellos, etc.
Pretty soon, your watching a film of the "live show".
I don't go see broadway plays, so this doesn't affect me, but I totally see it as a bad trend, going the wrong direction.
Broadway is about live shows, live musicians. Isn't that why they charge higher ticket prices then the movies?
Be seeing you...
"Baton Hero"? You'd need two controllers, one for each hand-- in traditional conducting technique, the right hand dictates the rhythm and the left hand is free to point at individual sections and give them interpretive cues (dynamics, articulation etc). You could probably develop an interface that was quite usable, e.g. assigning different interpretive cues to each controller button.
It's a silly idea in some ways, but one which Glenn Gould might have approved of. Towards the end of his life he became interested in producing interactive recordings where the listener could fine-tune the performance to his liking. At the time-- and this was in the late 1970s, before MIDI-- this meant giving the listener multiple "takes" of each musical segment so that he could edit them together as he pleased. Today other solutions are possible.
We will continue to use real people here as they cost less then the software plugs to recreate/replace them. I'm sure Broadway just sees this as a business decision, just as we do in the developing world, where human labor is much cheaper then machines.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
It's unfortunate, but replacing percussionists with synthesizers and replacing strings with synthesizers has been going on for a very long time. As someone above mentioned, it is less expensive to hire one musician than three. It is also easier to reinforce a synthesizer than a violin.
Before getting waxing too large about the aethestics of replacing strings with synths, let's keep in mind we are talking about _musical theater_. Mostly, the strings are playing footballs anyway. When the Metropolitan Opera starts firing violinists and hires a synth player, that will be a story. (Don't hold your breath.)
Synthesizers have been used in pit orchestras on Broadway for at least thirty years by my count. They've actually created a challenge for long-running shows. The book gets written for a particular machine with particular patches. But the show could outlive the lifecycle of the synthesizer! I remember hearing in the 80s that "Cats" was having a hard time finding a replacement Yamaha DX7, and someone was going to have to re-orchestrate the keyboard book.
Sooooo, after 30 years, Broadway finally clued in to MIDI?
I guess the USA is leading the world again. Follow me. I am right behind you.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
When *I* pay to go to such performance, *I* pay for a live performance with all the error and the nicety it entails. If *you* producer of such play start using synthetiser, then you lost my clientel unless you apply a serious shake down on the ticket price. What next, replace the performer with a 3D screen ?
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I didn't say JSB "ditched" the organ or harpsichord. But he didn't shy from the new technology either. There are several contemporary documents describing his use of the pianoforte, an instrument which had recently been introduced into Germany by Gottfried Silbermann. The most famous instance was in 1747 when Bach visited Frederick I in Potsdam and played on 7 different Silbermann fortepianos.
My response is probably too long for a comment post so here's a link if you're interested in a musician's perspective on the article:
http://danieleichenbaum.com/blog/?p=75
I know more about Zep than Floyd, so that's what I'll speak on:
I think one of the few things of theirs Zeppelin couldn't really play live was When The Levee Breaks, thanks to its production tactics [Fellow Led Zeppelin IV track The Battle of Evermore was also largely excluded from their concerts, in that case maybe because of Sandy Denny’s vocal part.]
A lot of great bands (such as those) included studio experimentation amongst their greatness; some of that stuff logically wouldn't be able to be produced live, though it also logically follows that musicians of that caliber would be better able to translate than most.
Were any studio ideas nixed because they couldn't be translated live? Then again, those bands have a lot of other material that could be played; you can't play your whole discography at every show, anyway.
Also, you could play live as much as you could, and modify or play from tape the most complex irreducible bits, like Queen did for Bohemian Rhapsody.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Rhapsody#Live_performances
Think of all the stuff The Beatles did in the studio long after their concert career ended.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Some people like pro wrestling even though components of it are faked and even if the fans acknowledge it as such. What’s it to ya?
Does it matter why a show is great or why people think it is?
If technology makes it less “live”, but the customers still like the experience, then so be it. Most think it doesn’t matter, doesn’t hurt much, or might even be an improvement. To those who care, tough shit if your expensive niche is expensive and if your artistic idealism/snobbery doesn’t mesh with actual people in the real world. Economics and/or time should speak for themselves.
The music is an important part of the show, but it’s not the entirety of the show – other parts remain “live” (perhaps those which are harder to computerize and which are the truly essential components of the “live experience”). It’s been a recurring observation of mine that live entertainment has to offer something that “the studio” doesn’t; the show doesn’t have to be _completely_ live.
On the pop-music analogies elsewhere in this thread:
Pop concerts tend to be visual productions as well as or instead of the music.
(Thus, the Broadway analogy holds surprisingly well?)
As with any genre, there is variation in quality. Trapt and Nickelback are both rock bands, but so is (insert your band of choice here). I like Lady Gaga [putting flame-retardant suit onNOW], but that doesn’t mean I like the other stuff. In part this is because she often breaks outside of the strict characterization of the genre that the comments complain about. She definitely does sing live and handles her own piano/keyboard; I like pointing out the songs/performances that emphasize this. Her backing instrumentalists at least seem to provide strong accents. (It seems like electronic beats could be hard to completely reproduce live, especially acoustically; that’s just the nature of the genre) She very much fits some characterizations of the genre, such as the nonmusic aspects, especially well.
The best live music I've been to so far was Flogging Molly, but the best show I've seen so far is hers, not that her music is _bad_, especially by the standards of the genre.
And yes, the crowd is itself part of the experience.
I saw a Zep cover band a couple nights ago (how’s that for serious and authentic music, huh?); I noticed a couple of crib sheets on stage but didn’t care because it still rocked.
And you can like both/all categories anyway.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yeah, those who really like a particular act have seen it multiple times or want to.
People do this with some films they really like, even though those are exactly the same each time [except for Rocky Horror. :P]. Considering that, it's no surprise that a lot of people would go to repeat performances of a live show that has some minor variations between showings. Could there also be some intentional variation built in to encourage this audience? Yes, but it seems like the bulk of the crowd is only going to be willing and able to see it about once anyways.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Isn't this 'news' 20 years old already? Frankly I think most 'Broadway' music should be replaced with silence.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
"Oh good, it sounds different from the album, they must be playing it live, but wait, they could have recorded a secret alternate version to play back from tape for this purpose." Reaches the point of silly speculation, though.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
People complain about those rendered unemployed by labor-saving technology. Quite literally Luddite. However, if X people are able to find something else to do, then there's economic progress since more and different things are being produced.
X must be greater than the production cost of the labor-saving technology [which itself employs some people] for this math to work, but X doesn't have to encompass the _entire_ group of people who were replaced by the technology.
Yes, this works in the aggregate not on an individual level, and yes, it's not instant.
How to distribute the gains presents another economic challenge, but that shows up with a lot of econ issues.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I just saw West Side Story on the 29th and the one comment I made to those I talked to about the performance was how great the orchestrated music sounded. Not the actor/actresses or how well they did, not the set design (which was in hindsight pretty cool), not the lighting or our seats (nosebleed). From our seats, we watched the timpani player (with some other percussive pieces) and were amazed that he could sit there for 5 minutes, play a few rolls and sit back until the next fusilade.
Jeez, if you're going to replace the musicians in the pit, why not go whole hog? It would probably be cheaper to film the production on a sound stage and show the whole thing on pay-per-view.
Wait, you mean the point is to get people to watch a live performance? EXACTLY!
I can see doing this in cases where I've seen it done well--when it's inconvenient to have a full orchestra but you want the sound of a full orchestra, such as a small-town performance (where you might be hard-pressed to hire a decent-sized competent orchestra)...but to do it on Broadway? Yuck.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
From the radio show "X Minus One":
http://otr.relicradio.com/2010/03/sf94-the-category-inventor-by-x-minus-one/
Really, no one? RTFM before you condemn the tech.
1) It is meant to reduce the costs of large budget product productions incurred by touring companies and smaller theaters.
2) This doesn't replace the entire orchestra. It is meant as a supplement for those that can only afford a few musicians.
3) You do know that this has been used for about the last 15 years, right? Chances are that you have been to a show that used it.
Try post this stuff at thewombforums. I enjoy it when they debunk this type of stuff there. I don't have time to write the essay length stuff that's required to thoroughly dismantle this. Some of the guys over there have say they've been doing it for 15 years so they are prepared for you.