Music lovers in North Carolina are due for a strange treat next month.
They will hear two piano virtuosi in concert … but both musicians are long dead.
The music will be played on a grand piano that has been specially programmed to give a note-perfect, live rendition of ancient recordings made by Alfred Cortot in 1928 and Glenn Gould in 1962.
”The piano will replicate every note struck, down to the velocity of the hammer and position of the key when it was played,” the British weekly magazine New Scientist reports in next Saturday’s issue.
The key to the phantom concert lies in the transcription of the scratchy recordings into a high-resolution version of Midi, the standard format for encoding music for computers.
The usual problem with Midi transcription is polyphony — distinguishing several notes that are played simultaneously.
Attempts to transcribe polyphonic notes are typically only 80% successful, says New Scientist. About 10% of polyphonic notes are missing and another 10% are mistranscribed, which can give the replicated music a hollowness or discordance.
Zenph Studios, a software company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, claims it has found a solution to the problem, although it refuses to say how for commercial reasons.
It has successfully tried out the Cortot and Gould pieces on the Disklavier Pro, one of only a few concert grand pianos that can record and play back high-definition Midi files.
A concert will be held in Raleigh next month in which Cortot — dead since 1962 — will ”play” a Chopin prelude, while Gould, in his grave since 1982, will ”perform” Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
By faithfully transcribing the notes and reproducing them exactly as they were played at the time, the technique could haul out of the archives innumerable sound recordings that have never been released because of flaws such as background noise.
Zenph’s next project is to clean up a recording made at a private party by the jazz giant Art Tatum two years before his death in 1956, the report says. — AFP
