Zenph Studios will let the old piano masters come back to life

[Nordlys]

The company Zenph Studios tries to recreate recordings that were made in the past. They will "take piano recordings and convert them back into the precise keystrokes and pedal motions that were used to create them".
This is done with a software that converts audio (wav) to MIDI. (something which is a very difficult thing for a computer to do). When they have the MIDI it can be played back on a Yamaha Disklavier.

Why should they do this?
The reason they give is: to take recordings from the past with inferior sound, and record them again with today's sound quality. Of course, it means it will also be possible to hear old recordings "live" (with a disklavier), something which will always be better than a recording.

However, they say further that it could be possible to analyse the style of playing of for example Horowitz with the computer, and then make an algorithm which will make the computer play anything in the style of Horowitz.

Here is a link: http://www.cvnc.org/reviews/2005/features05/Zenph.html


What are your thoughts on this?

[pianonut]

interesting!  to me, learning from recordings is harder than watching someone live, but i suppose for people who really want to hear a certain recording (or what someone would have possibly sounded like) better, it's really helpful.  personally, it might a little of an infringement though.  sort of like someone taking your dna and creating some sort of identical twin.  and, what about the commisions from your playing. you'd lose them to a machine (who might play more precisely, and make your old recordings sound worse).  i don't know.  science is making a connundrum of a lot of things.  some things get better and them some things get stuck with feeding tubes until someone pulls the  plug.  what if you are listening to the recording and it gets stuck (like my cd in the car) and starts repeated a phrase over and over.

[w0mbat]

And here is a great article about it on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10439850

[jlh]

And here is a great article about it on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10439850

I heard the recreation by Zenph Studios of Gould's 1955 Goldberg recording live in a concert at last year's World Piano Pedagogy Conference.  It sounds much better live than in the recordings of it on that site. 

They advertised the concert this way:

"this just in - GLENN GOULD will perform "LIVE" in Atlanta at WPPC"

[ramseytheii]

Krystian Zimerman gave an interview in, I think, Clavier, several years ago.  He talked with recording engineers who had remastered some Cortot recordings, who had gleefully reported finding notes omitted from the left hand, not previously apparent.  He pointed out in the interview that the technology was so vastly different, everyone had to adapt the way they played to fit the technology. 

In a brilliant insight, he noted that was part of Cortot's genius: to adapt his style to inadequate technology; to produce recordings of incredible dynamic variety and unforgettable impressions with equipment that technically shouldn't have been able to do that.  To go back and "expose" the hidden flaws by means of modern technology just exposes ignorance and bad taste on the part of the engineers, who mistakenly believe one technology of one epoch (in this case, their own) to be universal.

Walter Ramsey