View Full Version : Robotic Grand Pianos
A quirky form of recorded music, that readers may be interested in.
The trick is to accurately analyse in digital form an historic recording, and then programme a robotic grand piano to play it. See the Example of Rachmaninoff :
http://www.zenph.com/
"Walker could now pursue his teenage dream of reproducing the musical style of Rachmaninoff. Partnering with Schwaller again, he invested in a Yamaha Disklavier Pro, a robotic concert grand piano that can precisely play music fed to it in digital form. The two spent a year reverse engineering this exquisitely built but poorly documented machine. Then they turned to the even harder task of translating old musical recordings into digitized descriptions of exactly how each of the notes was played. Along the way, they hired a handful of other accomplished computer scientists with musical backgrounds for their new company, Zenph Sound Innovations."
Back in 1983 the Almeida Festival included a concert by Richard Teitelbaum in which he played one grand while two others were controlled by computer driven keyboard players made, if I recall correctly, by a company associated with Marantz. One of the pieces, which involved, in addition to Teitelbaum's playing, a digital transcription of an original piano roll of a work by Chopin, was titled "Reverse Polish Notation". :whistle:
I have a cassette recording of it somewhere, at least I hope it still survives.
aka Calum Da Jazbo
03-02-11, 01:20
zenph used Art Tatum recordings to create a recreation of his playing .... never did get round to either acquiring or hearing it ...yet ....
New to me. I've got a few transcriptions of player pianos and they're fascinating but this seems to offer something quite different and potentially thrilling. Let's see what they come up with.
Flosshilde
03-02-11, 10:26
From the description/explanation Oddball quotes it would seem that the aim is not so much for the piano to reproduce a recording made by the pianist, but to programme the piano to play something the pianist hadn't recorded. Which would be positively spooky - recitals given by long-dead performers, the audience gathered round a piano listening to a pianist who wasn't there.
aka Calum Da Jazbo
03-02-11, 10:51
the first zenph recording of Glen Gould was reviewed on CD Review and there was quite a discussion on the OMB about it and the integrity stuff etc .... my understanding is that they reproduce a performance Flosshilde not create a new one ....
the first zenph recording of Glen Gould was reviewed on CD Review and there was quite a discussion on the OMB about it and the integrity stuff etc .... my understanding is that they reproduce a performance Flosshilde not create a new one ....
Yes. And I think one defect that emerged was that it didn't really take into account how a live performer would react to the acoustic of the real space in which he/she was performing - so unless the new reproducing piano was set up in the same hall as the original performance, a whole dimension of the musical intelligence of the original performer was lost.
Flosshilde
03-02-11, 11:56
my understanding is that they reproduce a performance Flosshilde not create a new one ....
I was basing my comment on this in the quote above - "reproducing the musical style of Rachmaninoff", which to me suggested that they were trying to analyse the performing style (rather in the way that an author's style is analysed to identify if a text is by him or someone else). I was probably reading more into it than was there. Pity - a 'ghost' piano recital would be intriguing - especially if the music was something composed after the pianist's death - or am I straying into 'Bach would have wanted his keyboard works to be played on a piano' territory?
Some further information which may help you decide on the ulimate aims of Zenph:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/software/hightech-startup-recreates-sound-of-great-musicians
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/dream-job-john-q-walker-ii
"Eventually, Walker says, he’ll have software to analyze many recordings and define the attributes that make one pianist different from another. At that point, it will be possible to create a virtual Gould or a virtual Rachmaninoff and to have a modern instrument play in their styles pieces these musicians never performed—a notion that might leave some music aficionados aghast but others delighted. "Here’s a different way to preserve an artist," Walker says, "in how they played.""
Then there's this - which I found by accident the other day - http://store.acousticsounds.com/d/38634/Glenn_Gould-Bach_Goldberg_Variations-Hybrid_Multichannel_SACD I may even buy the SACD as somewhere it's available at a really low price.
Flosshilde
03-02-11, 13:22
Ah, so I was right after all :smiley:
I'm not sure about 'preserving an artist' - sounds a bit too much like Lenin's carefully maintained corpse.
aka Calum Da Jazbo
03-02-11, 13:57
indeed Flosshilde, and what a surprising thing to do ..... the Hollywood cgi studios could probably recreate a hologram of the composer to go along with the cga music!
talk about ghosts in the machine eh .....
I was actually looking for SACDs - perhaps of Hilary Hahn (there were some good ones, but most are NLA ....) - and I found this - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bach-Goldberg-Variations-Johann-Sebastian/dp/B000LE0THE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296743272&sr=8-1 - which is at least cheap right now.
Zenph takes audio recordings and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicating what was originally recorded.
I nearly read this as ‘turns them back into live persons...
I see the technical interest but isn’t music, classical music at least, worth listening to because it is composed and performed by living human beings who do unexpected things both intentionally and unintentionally? As vinteuil says ‘a live performer would react to the acoustic of the real space in which he/she was performing I expect a living performer would be influenced by all sorts of things that are specific to that particular time'. I imagine a living performer would be influenced by all sorts of things that are specific to that particular time.
Slight digression. Wasn't there also a really huge piano which someone made and used to make recordings sometime in the last decade? It might have been described as having 16 and 32 ft stops!
One could ask the question, however, "why would anyone really want to record many works on Steinways or bigger?", as there seems to be quite a move now to record on smaller, older pianos, or other keyboard instruments perhaps more in keeping with the music (e.g Bach). So maybe one could get Gould playing the Goldbergs on a harpsichord after all with a robotic transcription - though perhaps that would lack as much integrity as just leaving everything alone!
The assumption that Steinways (or similar) are the best instruments to play on is surely not always true, or appropriate.
Flosshilde
04-02-11, 17:15
Dave,
You've surely kicked a hornet's nest with that last sentence!
Flossie
So where are the hornets?
MrGongGong
06-02-11, 09:02
I can see the point from an esoteric processing point of view
BUT
one does ask the question WHY ?
in the same way that I would ask why anyone would want (apart from as a composing tool and for purely pragmatic or financial reasons ............) to make my computer sound like a piano ?
In one of these articles its described as "the holy grail of electronic music" eeeeeeeeeeer NO it's not, it reminds me of all those demonstrations of programming where the aim is to synthesise a voice that we can't distinguish from a "real" voice , very useful if advanced DSP etc is your bag but hardly interesting at all
MrGG
One reason might be that it's just another (though likely very flawed) way to improve the quality of an original recording, which might make it more enjoyable.
Last night I watched part of The Far Pavillions, and I was surprised at how bad the video was, and the sound wasn't great either. It's nothing like as old as some of the older audio recordings which we listen to.
The film would have been more enjoyable if something could have been done to improve both the video and the sound. Some people may feel the same about some audio recordings.
By way of digression, in that film, isn't quite a lot of the scenery "adjusted"? At one point there was a view of what looked like the Amber Fort near Jaipur, and it had impressive mountains, no doubt to suggest the Himalayas, in the background. Is that possible in reality? I don't think so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber,_India
MrGongGong
06-02-11, 10:57
One reason might be that it's just another (though likely very flawed) way to improve the quality of an original recording, which might make it more enjoyable.
Indeed that is the aim
however removing all the "noise" means (for folk like me at any rate !) that you remove much of what might make the recording interesting, which might be hiss, background noise , artefacts etc
its all electronic music
Hmm, re. Dave's latest message, anyone else here much prefer the old analogue Red Dwarfs to their digital remasters? :whistle:
You had me lost for a while there Bryn. Not seen Red Dwarf for some time.
Re pianos, anyone else tried the Gould reconstruction yet? I listened yesterday - actually twice as the disc has a repeat in binaural stereo. I was surprised - it wasn't too bad, though perhaps a bit sterile. No Gould groaning at all, as in the later recordings. I've not compared with the original 1955 recording yet.
I've got it somewhere (the recon, that is). A charity shop buy, if I recall correctly. Must give it a spin some time.
I've got it somewhere (the recon, that is). A charity shop buy, if I recall correctly. Must give it a spin some time.Do you know how many recordings there are by GG of the Goldbergs. I think there are at least 3 - the 1955 standard version, the 1981 digital version, and one other - but now I'm not sure. I thought there was another from around 1955.
Maybe one was a live recording?
I was also surprised how many recordings he made, and how many are still available if you look in the right places - Mozart, Beethoven, a lot of Bach, etc. Come to think of it, I think I've got a box with some of them - somewhere.
I have cds of at least three different recordings, plus the digital player piano version of the famous 1955. One is indeed live (Salzburg 1959).
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