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Science Technology

First Virtual Piano Competition 174

Posted by timothy from the tickling-ivory-from-afar dept.
bluegreenone writes: "The New York Times has an article on what may be the first 'virtual' piano competition. One of the judges for the contest being held in St. Paul will actually be in Japan. He will evaluate the performances as relayed by Yamaha's Disklavier system. This has some interest from a technical standpoint, and also raises new questions about what a "live" performance is."
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First Virtual Piano Competition More

First Virtual Piano Competition

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  • What is 'live'? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 )
    He will evaluate the performances as relayed by Yamaha's Disklavier system...[this] raises new questions about what a "live" performance is.

    Well, a live performance isn't that for sure. Whatever this judge think he's judging, it isn't the performance of the artist.

    Now this would not be true for, say, a synthesiser performance. There the whole thing can accurately be digitally reproduced. But for piano? Forget it.

    Cheers,
    Ian
    (Keyboard player, and to some extent pianist too)

    • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Quote: There the whole thing can accurately be digitally reproduced. But for piano? Forget it.

      The Disklavier system is a piano operated by computer controlled actuators. I think is can re-produce actions that no human could accomplish (it has a full keyboard span). It has the strength to reproduce any human movement, but I don't remeber how accurate the control and timing was.

      • Probably not (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ted Maul ( 582118 )
        There are, however, in existence a large number of piano rolls from the late 19th/early 20th century recorded directly by famous pianists or composers of the time. Debussy did quite a few.

        These work rather differently from a digital system. For a start, there's no quantisation so minute variations in time are picked up by the system. It also does a pretty good job on a wide range on dynamics.

        This means that you can actually hear Debussy playing some of his more famous compositions even though he's dead.

        • Trouble with piano rolls is that there's no dynamic content -- the notes, however detailed they may be in the time domain, are binary.

          I've got some MP3s of Gershwin, recorded from his own piano rolls. Interesting stuff to hear, for sure, but I'd rather hear a more modern analog recording of a performance by a skilled pianist than a binary representation of the original author on punched paper.
        • You know, when people complain about digital technology ruining the music, I can't help rolling my eyes. Sure, incorrectly implemented technology can change the way the music sounds. When it's done right, though, it can only get better.

          Mr. Maul here thinks the lack of quantization in the paper roll makes the music "real". Yeah, well, when the quantization gets smaller than the normal variations in friction of the pins against the sides of the holes in the paper, especially as the paper wears, then one has a digital recording system more accurate than the paper roll, quantization or no.

          I will admit, there's a certain special something when someone is performing live you can't get from a recording. But just because that recording is digital doesn't mean it's any less special.

      • If the system can record the performance with such stunning accuracy that it can be reproduced flawlessly anytime, have we not lost the "soul" of live music; the investment of emotion that the artist put into that specific performance?

        Live, however, is more complex. Is the playback immediate (allowing for communications delay)? Thousands of people watched the Seattle Symphany Orchestra "live" over the Internet a few years back, and I didn't hear any quibbling over the communications delay. Unless you are physically present, nothing is technically live. Even old radio shows were performed live and broadcast immediately, and there was never any debate.

        Perhaps the electronic reproduction method is confusing the question of live. If you consider the Disklavier capable of high-fidelity audio reproduction (assuming the piano is well tuned :), then would it not fall into the same category as a television or radio?

        If the physically present and the telepresent compare notes and find the physical version better, would not the same thing be said of a televised concert without any complaint of it not having been live?

    • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Ami Ganguli ( 921 )

      I haven't actually read the article (New York Times Free bla bla - I don't feel like registering), but I don't see why a piano performance can't be accurately reproduced. It would be easier than a lot of other instruments (like a violin or trumpet, for example).

      You've got 88 keys plus 3 pedals that are hit and released at precise times with a given force. The number of variables is limited and pretty straightforward. A sensor under each key could record the performance accurately, and a regular piano with a bunch of robotic plungers could play it back.

      The amount of data is pretty limited as well. Figure 120 samples per second should be adequate, and 256 states for each sample * (88+3=91) data points. Uncompressed, that's 10kB/s, 600kB/m. Given the fact that most piansist's only have 10 fingers you could get that down to 75kB/m even before compression.

      Or am I missing something?

      • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by beckett ( 27524 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @06:00AM (#3699870) Homepage Journal
        You've got 88 keys plus 3 pedals that are hit and released at precise times with a given force. The number of variables is limited and pretty straightforward. A sensor under each key could record the performance accurately, and a regular piano with a bunch of robotic plungers could play it back.
        it doesn't sound like you've played a lot of piano. The whole idea of the piano is in it's full name: pianoforte. this means that you can vary the intensity of each note played by varying how hard you strike the key. the piano was leaps and bounds ahead of the harpsicord that only could pluck the string one way. the piano uses a set of hammers to vary the intensity of the sound. where a disclavier might fall short is in recording the nuances of pressure applied: it just might not be exact enough. if you play the the purely electronic Yamaha keyboards you really miss out on the dynamic range of an authentic, stringed, piano. it's not as simple as sequencing in midi. When the piano is played masterfully there is a liason between each note that joins the whole composition together.
        • You probably know this, but your post seems to give the impression that the Disklavier is an electronic keyboard. It's actually a fully stringed piano that is played automatically. :-)

          • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:5, Informative)

            by Huge Pi Removal ( 188591 ) <oliver+slashdot@watershed.co.uk> on Friday June 14, 2002 @06:11AM (#3699901) Homepage
            But the pianist will be responding to the touch and feel of the piano (s)he's actually playing: I know, I'm a pianist. So unless they have an *identical* piano, in *identical* humidity, etc (which is impossible, given the subtleties a really good piano contains), they can't possibly have a 100% accurate reproduction.

            The question is, is it accurate *enough* for this purpose? I would claim "no", but I've never seen the system in action.
        • That was a very good synopsis of what analog really means! Thank you for posting!

          Mod this up.

          Composition rules. Digital always wants to take the 'easy route' and simply 'composite' which is not the same as composition... which requires not only skill but experience and insight as well.

          thanks again for saying as much.

        • What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about your senses, what you feel, taste, smell, or see, or liaison in piano playing, then all you're talking about are electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

      • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by iangoldby ( 552781 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @06:02AM (#3699875) Homepage
        There are a few things that might not be captured, such as the speed at which a damper is replaced on the strings when a note or the pedal is released. I don't know if the system accurately reproduces this. Certainly MIDI wouldn't.

        I suspect the main difference between a live performance and a performance from a Disklavier is that a live performer is constantly adjusting his touch to account for the individual characteristics of the piano, whereas IFAIK the Disklavier system does not have this feedback loop.

        So it would only sound exactly the same if the piano used to play back the performance was identical in touch and tone to the piano that recorded the performance.

        Mind you, I doubt if I or many others would notice the difference.

        • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:3, Informative)

          by GroovBird ( 209391 )
          > There are a few things that might not be captured, such as the speed at which a damper is replaced on the strings when a note or the pedal is released. I don't know if the system accurately reproduces this. Certainly MIDI wouldn't.

          According to this [borg.com], it will. It can record both the speed at which the note is triggered as well as it is released. From the specs:

          Note Off
          Category: Voice

          Purpose

          Indicates that a particular note should be released. Essentially, this means that the note stops sounding, but some patches might have a long VCA release time that needs to slowly fade the sound out. Additionally, the device's Hold Pedal controller may be on, in which case the note's release is postponed until the Hold Pedal is released. In any event, this message either causes the VCA to move into the release stage, or if the Hold Pedal is on, indicates that the note should be released (by the device automatically) when the Hold Pedal is turned off. If the device is a MultiTimbral unit, then each one of its Parts may respond to Note Offs on its own channel. The Part that responds to a particular Note Off message is the one assigned to the message's MIDI channel.

          Status

          0x80 to 0x8F where the low nibble is the MIDI channel.

          Data

          Two data bytes follow the Status.

          The first data is the note number. There are 128 possible notes on a MIDI device, numbered 0 to 127 (where Middle C is note number 60). This indicates which note should be released.

          The second data byte is the velocity, a value from 0 to 127. This indicates how quickly the note should be released (where 127 is the fastest). It's up to a MIDI device how it uses velocity information. Often velocity will be used to tailor the VCA release time. MIDI devices that can generate Note Off messages, but don't implement velocity features, will transmit Note Off messages with a preset velocity of 64.

          Yours truly,

          Dave
      • I don't see why a piano performance can't be accurately reproduced

        One of the first (and perhaps still!) the most accurate way to record the piano is with the player piano - punch holes in a strip of paper indicating each key played. I listened to a player piano recording of Scott Joplin from 1910 and it sounded far clearer than any fancy CD/SACD format could approximate - because the sound came out of an actual piano. Of course, this method is not too effective with other instruments.... but it is the principle behind the punch card.

        • Err, apart from the fact that with a piano roll the keys are either down, or not down. It's been covered in other posts in detail, but the piano was designed to have an infinite range between loud and soft. Something which a piano roll cannot capture at all. (at least systems like the Disklavier attempt to do this)

          • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Informative)

            by fruey ( 563914 )
            infinite range between loud and soft.

            In the MIDI specification, it's a 7 bit number, which means 0-127 in decimal, which controls the volume. Hardly infinite. I doubt they're using anything other than MIDI (with Yamaha DiskClavier enhancements, maybe). Some controls like pedalling are 1 bit (on or off) which is nothing like what you can do with real pedals (kinda mostly on but damping a little, etc)... pedalling is a key nuance for most performances.

            • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Insightful)

              by Qrlx ( 258924 )
              In the MIDI specification, it's a 7 bit number, which means 0-127 in decimal

              I bet that a human has more tha 127 levels of how hard they hit the keys. If guys like Creskin can tell you how many cards from a deck of cards they're holding in their hands just by touch, then I would have to think that a concert pianist has better than 7-bit resolution. It might not be a linear response either, maybe there's enhanced detail towards the very soft or very loud.

          • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Informative)

            by pianophile ( 181111 )
            >with a piano roll the keys are either down, or not down

            No, you're wrong. Player piano companies (such as Aeolian, Welte-Mignon, and Duo-Art) of the early 20th century worked very hard to make the best reproducing pianos possible, with great dynamic range. A well-maintained player piano can still play the old rolls with tremendous dynamic variation. If all they had was on or off, the great pianists of the day would never have 'recorded' on them.

      • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fruey ( 563914 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @06:06AM (#3699887) Homepage Journal
        The whole point is nuance. The piano player will actually react to the nuance of the piano he is playing. If he feels the upper octaves are quieter, he will adjust the strength he hits the keys. The harmonics generated by the strings will change based on those that are vibrating, but also by other external factors (a very very small nuance).

        In the case of the other piano, elsewhere in the world, there will be subtle differences in the instrument itself. Even if you can (and this is arguable) reproduce 99% of the nuance of the actual key velocity, you're not taking into account the fact that the musician is feeling and reacting to a separate instrument with a key action which must be different, affecting his touch, and with possible harmonic and amplitude differences across the piano keyboard range even given the same key velocity.

        But first and foremost this is most certainly NOT live music. It's reproduced mechanically, and that is no different from playing a CD (reproduced optically). Just because it's a real piano you're hearing, it's not the same piano the artist was playing. And he/she's not even there.

        • It certainly is *live* because the music is being heared as it's being played. Hence the definition of "live" music.
          • But it's not heard as it's being played - merely recorded onto disk. You have to take the disk out of the piano, send the files on it over the internet and then play it back -- synced up to the video that was transmitted live via satelite and recorded at the destination. This all takes about 30 minutes according to the article. That's not live... just a 'recording of a live performance'. Maybe later when they have it streaming from the piano telesynced to the video it can be called a 'televised live performance'. But it's still not live.

      • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I haven't actually read the article

        Then you'll fit right in here.

      • Or am I missing something?

        I believe so. Firstly, the instrument itself has to be identically strung. Pianos are not generic devices - you must adapt your style to the particular piano. Admittedly this is getting a little less now, but it is still true.

        Secondly, an artist is performing to his audience. Some choose to play off audience reaction, others stay in their own world and ignore the audience. Either approach is valid, but a person taking the the first route will be disadvantaged if their recording is simply played back in rote to an entirely different audience having entirely different reactions.

        Finally, I simply don't believe that the technology is there yet. Haven't read the article (NYT etc.), but I believe this is MIDI based. Having written MIDI applications, used MIDI for recording and also used MIDI to supplement my live playback, I can vouch that MIDI has serious timing problems when dealing with some events (SysExs and fader controls, normally). I forget the baud raute (my memory's getting rubbish - I used to know this kind of thing off by heart), but I believe it's simply a 9600kbps serial connection. You can lose a lot of precision in that.

        Cheers,
        Ian

        • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Informative)

          by GroovBird ( 209391 )
          From this [borg.com] site:

          MIDI is an asynchronous serial interface. The baud rate is 31.25 Kbaud ( 1%). There is 1 start bit, 8 data bits, and 1 stop bit (ie, 10 bits total), for a period of 320 microseconds per serial byte.

          Dave
      • (New York Times Free bla bla - I don't feel like registering)

        heh do what I did. Create a new Yahoo or Hotmail account using fake info, and use it for registering for stuff like this. Just let it fill up with spam. Its not your regular email

      • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by dunkstr ( 513276 )
        Reproducing the same notes on another piano is interesting, but by no means the same thing as a truly "physically-present" performance. There's a lot more depth to a piano than you're allowing. Even two pianos from the same manufacturer have a slightly different tone/tuning.

        As a(n amateur) pianist myself, nothing beats my grand at home; during a performance on another piano there's just something "wrong" about it. Maybe it's a little psychological; but other pianists agree with my comments ("the treble is dead" etc...) I find that my chords don't ring out in the same way that I'm used to and, consequently, I'm not as happy with the performance.

        Glenn Gould used to go around piano shops and try each piano and then he'd pick not one, but several. He'd say "this one is perfect for that Polonaise" and another was good for his Prelude and Fugue. Different pianos, as with pretty much any natural instrument, are distinctive; most professionals know this.

        Besides the technical coolness of this competition I'm surprised that the contestants and the judges would consider this a "live performance." I certainly wouldn't.

      • Re:What is 'live'? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by io333 ( 574963 )
        I'm a violinist and I have been sitting here for the last 10 minutes trying to figure out if a violin performance could ever, regardless of the level of future technolgy, be reproduced. First I was concentrating on the left hand (the one on the fingerboard that touches the strings). I decided that it might, at some point, be possible by scanning the hand and fingers with some sort of combination of MRI or lasers and then just adjusting string length on the repro instrument accordingly. Alternatively, a series of sensors might be run underneath the fretboard to detect precise string length. But the bow? That will be impossible. As any violin teacher will tell you, teaching left hand is easy: find note, wiggle. Teaching (and learning) right hand/bow is a lifelong struggle as there aren't really any words to describe half of what is going on, and the other half isn't even something that the violinist is concious of. There are infinitely endless variations of pressure, angle, and attack, not to mention the subtleties of dealing with a spring constant that varies down the length of the stick and varies quickly with humidity changes over the course of a few minutes. I saw a book once that illustrated over 100 ways of just gripping the bow in order to achieve various things. Nevertheless, it hasn't stopped some from trying:

        The Mubot [atip.or.jp]

      • Piano music is essentially two things: How hard you hit a key and how long you hold it for, repeated for every depression of the key. That sounds clinical, but bear with me (I'm a pianist who's worked with midi far, far too much, so I'm a good guy).

        Measuring the time the key is depressed is relatively simple until you take pedal mechanics into play. Then it's a helluva lot more than the up and down of the keys (Which is STILL more subtle than an on/off, true/false relationship anyway). You can strike a key with the pedal down and slowly release the pedal so the sound...it doesn't fade, it's more like it slowly dies if you can imagine the difference.

        Here's the kicker. Key velocity. There are two major, glaring problems with the way the key pressure us measured.

        1. The velocity is only measured when the key is struck. Therefore the velocity remains constant until the key is released - then it stops. How the sound fades, etc, depends on the makeup of the sound, not the mechanism of the recording itself You can have the greatest keyboard in the world, but if the piano sound you're using it with is badly done, you're sunk. (This is primarily a MIDI problem - I realize the system the article talks about is analog, sensors on strings, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue.)

        Triv
    • What makes this any less "live"? in either case you are talking about sounds relayed through a medium. What makes one piece of technology more "live" than another? Is "liveness" simply a factor based on presence of the artist in time? Or his/her presence in time and space?
      • i would say that 'liveness' as you put it relies upon several factors, one being 'acoustics'. The particular venue is irreplaceable by digital or even analog recording capabilities. you can not possibly replicate the sound of the Sydney Amphitheatre with an orchestra/individual playing, via any recorded means.

      • What makes this any less "live"? in either case you are talking about sounds relayed through a medium.

        Precisely. The medium is different, hence the performance cannot be considered identical.

        Cheers,
        Ian

  • Why would this change the definition of live? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 3.5 stripes ( 578410 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @05:36AM (#3699825)
    Has anyone ever questioned whether a "live" broadcast is live? I thought the difference between live and non live was the venue, live is all performed in front of an audience with no retries, non live is studio recorded material with editing/mastering etc inbetween the performance/performances and the final recording.

    I'll admit I simplified it a lot, but I don't see how this stands to change the definition of live.
    • What if Britney Spears came on stage and simply played a CD of her music? Or Milli Vanilli? Would that be live?
      • Just for your information, Milli Vanilli never made music, at least not the two guys that were presented to us as being the artists. So when they were doing playback on stage, was that live?
        • Long time no see, Jedi.

          What I am baffled about with Milli Vanilli is that they had huge numbers of fans and even won a Grammy for their music. When it turned out that it wasn't Rob and Fab (RIP) doing any of the singing, everyone turned against them. Wouldn't Milli Vanilli music still hold up though the performers (?) were disgraced?
          • Long time no see indeed. I'm quite surpised anybody still remembers me :)

            Anyways, in the case of Milli Vanilli I doubt it was the high quality music that persuaded the crowds, but rather the good-looking artists, their tropical clips etc.

            Which leads me to wonder how the public would react if say, Mark Knopfler, turned out to be a fake. The music of Dire Straits hardly depended on personality of funky clips to be interesting...
      • What if Britney Spears came on stage and simply played a CD of her music?

        She does - it's called lipsynching. She's not actually singing on stage...
    • I thought the difference between live and non live was the venue, live is all performed in front of an audience with no retries, non live is studio recorded material with editing/mastering etc inbetween the performance/performances and the final recording.


      So does live mean bound by time or space? In other words, does the musician need to be in front of me doing h/er thing, or just doing that thing at the same moment as I am listening to that thing? And what do you mean by editing and mastering in between the performance and the recording? The sound crew better be editing and mastering during a live performance.... Even the musicians need to adjust a knob now and again; how is that not editing? The definition of "live" is already in crisis....

    • I'll admit I simplified it a lot, but I don't see how this stands to change the definition of live.

      I don't think it does either - you have a "live" performance that you can go see, and a "televised live performance" (or recorded live performance) which is the same effort/accomplishment without editing.

      I don't think a virtual performance is near the same thing as seeing someone up on stage with all their human movements shared with us, or perhaps even reacting to an audience as some performances have (take Victor Borge for example) but it's an extension. A bit better than having a dodgy VHS copy of a performance, y'can have machinery in your own home play it all back for you... and for the truly obsessed, with far better quality in one sense than any traditional audio recording :)

      a grrl & her server [danamania.com]
    • That is the hallmark of a live performance. When the performer can respond to the audience and their reaction.

      A player piano is no different than lip-syncing or any other psuedo-live performance.

      Truely great live performances have the performers getting into the audience as much as the audience gets in to them.
  • The Disklavier system is pretty remarkable. Modern classic composer Sakamoto Ryuichi uses one in his live performances and it really enhances the show. It allows him to focus one one part of the music while the piano can play accompanying notes in the background.

    Very cool technology.

  • This is good for the objectivity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by novastyli ( 450003 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @05:43AM (#3699838)
    of a contest.

    Eventually all judge should not only be far away from the actual performance but also be anaware who is playing.

    The music community is too corrupt.
  • ok taken from the article

    But it will not be exactly the same time. It takes roughly 30 minutes to transmit and download a performance over the Internet.

    asumming that it even does get the pedal work just right, which the article does not leave a really strong impression of...

    what the heck do the pianists and crowd do for the 30 minute download, and the following minutes listening period (no way he will be judging on a stream, lol i could just see his face when it starts hittin traffic and buffering)...

    they gonna all start having tea and crumpets while waiting for this guy on another continent to be able to score?

    it does sound like really neat technology, and surely has it's uses, but is this really one of the better uses?
    • Pah, in brass band comps I've waited an hour until the judges were finished with their comments. Reading their very brief comments later and listening to the tape of the performance, I don't know where the hour of reflection went though :)

      Should be noted that this was at the end of all the performers, when the adjudicators were making extra notes based on the tapes etc. So I don't think 30 minutes at the end of a session is out of the question.
  • There's a site here [yamahamusicsoft.com].
    It's sponsored by Yamaha so it's gotta alota maketroid stuff. CBC radio has been keeping pretty good tabs on the competition. I think it's a little too borgish. This bar of music by 7 of 8.
  • As a proud Yamaha Disklavier owner (the MPX1), I can tell you that the action is unnoticably different from a normal piano. All the pickups are laser based, and not suction. As for midi not being sufficient? Bah! It captures the velocity of my playing to a tee. Even the pedal has 127 different levels of "on". When I record something I play, and replay it, there is absolutely 0 perceptable difference in the resulting sound.
    • When I record something I play, and replay it, there is absolutely 0 perceptable difference in the resulting sound.

      Yes, but you're playing it back on the same piano under the same conditions. In this case it's being played on a different piano in a different environment. There's no way the performance the judge hears is the same one the pianist played.

  • live or not, it's not the first such event (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Apogee ( 134480 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @06:14AM (#3699905)
    I remember that at least four years back, they held a very similar competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland (of course, sponsored by Yamaha).
    During the festival, you could enter the competition by playing an original composition or a known piece on one of the Disklaviers they had standing in the lobby of the main festival hall.
    Your performance would be recorded on a disk and later, all entries were judged by a jury that heard the pieces being reproduced by a Disklavier.
    So that technology is far from new, really. It's just once more that Yamaha is promoting their Disklavier.
  • ...let's see you try that with (say) a trumpet. Or, even worse, a violin (or any bowed instrument) or EVEN worse, with the electric guitar where each virtuoso tries new ways to produce sounds off of it (two words: Makita Cordless. Yeah, that's an extreme example.).

    This VirtualClavier is just some way to show off r&d for something that needs not r&d (at least that's my opinion, i know it sounds very short-sighted...) (others have done various similar stuff).

    live performance is just when the performer is using the instrument *now* to produce sound. This thing is not. This, might be a live performance, but not a live performance of a piano. It is a live performance of a VirtualClavier (wasn't midi fully capable of emulating the piano? what's this for!?)

    I salute them for their "silent" series. Not eletric not acoustic, yet electric and acoustic...
    • (wasn't midi fully capable of emulating the piano? what's this for!?)

      Disklavier music is saved in a (I think slightly extended) MIDI format.

      MIDI is capable of emulating the piano, provided that you have the appropriate instrument to play it back on.

      You seem to understand what MIDI is, but let me digress for the benefit of other people. Most people's experience with MIDI is General MIDI, where the music is played back through a computer's sound card, which simply takes pre-recorded sound samples and mixes them together. This is why General MIDI sucks.

      You could play MIDI back on a higher-quality electric piano, and get a somewhat higher-quality sound. (Assuming it's a good MIDI with the appropriate velocity information in the first place.)

      Or you could play it on a Disklavier, an acoustic piano which plays back MIDI as accurately as possible.
  • Every piano has its own unique sound characteristics, even two identical makes and models built at nearly similar times. Tiny variations in the way the strings are wound, the way the hammers wear from use, etc., will change the way an instrument sounds.

    A good performer is going to adapt to that, consciously or not, and his/her play style is going to subtly change to accentuate those quirks that enhance the overall sound of the composition and downplay those that intefere. These slight variations are not going to translate well to a whole different instrument even if you could transmit extremely accurate information, which the system almost certainly can't.

    • This is dead on. The notion that you can capture an artist's performance in a sequence of numbers that represents how they pushed down the keys on a particular piano in a particular hall, and graft that onto another piano in another room, is patently absurd. If the pianist is not directly responsible for the sound that the judge is hearing, how can this even be suggested as a suitable way to judge a realtime art like music?

      Secondly, CHEATING. It would be way to easy to correct mistakes before the final cut is sent to be judged. Worse than fixing mistakes, clearly below par players could multi-track passages they are not up to playing.

      No self-respecting musician will take part in a competition of this nature.
      • The article states pretty clearly that 7 of the judges for the competition will be watching the performances live. It is only the 8th judge who will be judging the Disklavier performance. This isn't a competition where people send in an audition tape (or in this case, a floppy disk) to represent them. The performance will be LIVE for 7 of the 8 judges, so I doubt there will be any cheating.

        In my mind, it isn't much different from submitting audition tapes vs. auditioning live, and audition tapes are a widely accepted practice.
  • Having played all my life, I can tell you that as with many people, watching on TV or remotely, or even being at a concert and haginv to watch on the big screen sucks compared to being in the first 5 rows. People have to see the live show up close and in person to really "be there".
    sir_haxalot

  • Kurt Vonnegut got this right... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TekkonKinkreet ( 237518 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @07:22AM (#3700015) Homepage
    ...in Player Piano, in 1955 or so. A recording, no matter how faithful, is a recording, it captures a performance, not a performer. The Disklavier is a player piano, a really good one. It makes the hammers hit the strings in (insert meaningless technical quibble here) the same way the pianist's fingers did. But until it captures Glenn Gould's humming, Stevie Wonder's head-bobbing, or Tori Amos' (essentially) fucking the piano stool, I will not be fooled into thinking that I am experiencing a live performance.

    (Been playing since I was four, and I prefer Steinways to Yamahas, but that's another matter.)
    • Until the early 90's, the Las Vegas casinos were among the larger employers of musicians.


      Then the musicians' union contract came up for renewal. The casinos wanted to use taped rather than live music for the smaller shows. The union went on strike, demanding all live music all the time, wiht no room for compromise.


      Having no choice, the casinos then used taped music for *all* the shows--and found that noone cared. The "live" music had already been coming from another floor, piped in electronically.


      Eventually, the union withered away. (heck, they may still claim to be on strike for all I know :).


      The bottom line was that the union single-handedly destroyed the employment prospects for musicians in las vegas. I handled a couple of their bankruptcies. And they paid dues for that . . .


      hawk

    • You argument about Mrs. Amos' activities while she is playing (which I've witnessed 3 rows back) might be the reason they SHOULD judge piano compititions via a digital link.

      Imagine Mr. Gould vs. Mrs. Amos playing the same piece, and playing it excatly the same, but Mr. Gould hums and Mrs. Amos does her thing. An all male judge panel might award Mrs. Amos where as the same panel, having witnessed the contest on a remote piano would realize perhaps the actual PIANO PLAYING was better in Mr. Gould's performance.

      M@
    • If they could only modify the Disclavier to acuratly reproduce a hummer [Gould], head [Wonder] and a fuck [Amos], they would sell like crazy.

      M@
    • You're right in principle, but to make your point, you had to pick examples of performers doing things that would never actually be done in this type of contest. If this is the only difference between the Disklavier performance and the original, then I think the argument against the Disklavier is very weak.

      Of course, a lot of people quoted in the article, as well as people posting here, are saying that there are real audible differences. I suspect that there aren't any audible differences, and it's an easy test to make: take some of the people who judge these competitions, and give them a blindfolded test to see if they can tell the real performance from the Disklavier one.

      If, as I suspect, there is no audible difference, then we have to ask whether the supposed non-audible advantages of live performance are important enough to outweigh the very real advantages of using the Disklavier. The article made it clear that there was a compelling reason for wanting to use the Disklaver: they can't find judges who are real professional peformers to judge these competitions, because their touring schedules don't allow it. According to the guy pushing for the Disklavier system, the quality of the judging is really bad in most of these competitions.

  • Very unfair: (Score:3, Informative)

    by aznxk3vi17 ( 465030 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @07:31AM (#3700029)
    Now, being a pianist myself for 13 years of my 18 year life, I think I know something about piano. We truly have lost a sense of our musicality now that we are judging every individual key stroke. Faking a passage? Sorry, even though it sounds good, you still missed that F#, or maybe you cracked hitting that B. I tell you, the masters like Walter Gieseking, Horowitz, Rubinstein, they made SO MANY mistakes, in recordings and performances alike, but nobody criticized it! If those same masters tried a competition today, they wouldn't even get past the preliminary rounds!! We'd be missing out on some of the best music ever made by anybody's fingers! I say, return to the good 'ol Steinway grand, or even a Bosendorfer. Leave the mistakes for the performer to know.
    • I agree totally. I started classical piano when I was nine, and I gave it up after a few years because I hated the concept of trying to reproduce everyone else's performances. Jazz has been a much more creative and rewarding endeavor for me.
      • classical performance isn't about reproducing anything. it's about taking a story that somebody wrote, and telling it in your own personal way. i've seen lots of technically great musicians who clearly were never going to go anywhere because they missed this vital point.
  • I can't read the article (not going to register) but it seems like all you guys are saying it's not possible with MIDI... yeah, of course it isn't. But if they replacing MIDI with a more flexible system like OSC [berkeley.edu], then it's totally possible. It seems like they have developed something similarly flexible with Disklavier so all the nuance and such will be included.

  • I can see it now.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by GW Hayduke ( 19878 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @07:51AM (#3700078)
    In a bizzare twist of events, Jimmy "w@r3zg0d" Stimmler won the Piano Competition after the other contestants decided to substitute "Chopsticks" instead of a Schubert Sonata of their choice.
    Still reeling from his victory, the only comment Mr. Stimmler could say is "I 0wn J00 allz"....

    Yeah yeah I know lame ass joke, and no offense to any real mr. stimmlers out there...
  • This reminds me of an interview with Kraftwerk, where they envisioned that one day they would be able to send their robots [studenthem.gu.se] on tour and themselves staying at home in the Kling-Klang studio, sending music and video to the venue in question.
    Seems like somebody else at least partially beat them to making the vision a reality.
    • A band called Future Sound of London (aka FSOL) have been doing this for years, they send out their lighting rig and stage set, and pipe the audio live to the gig over ISDN.

  • My family has one of the old player pianos that uses the punched out paper rolls. The only rolls we have are old "grandparent's music" so we don't use it that much (or at all, actually).

    I can see a place for the new player pianos in music education and maybe at cheap religious events (cheap weddings, funerals, etc.) but unless Britney releases her next big hit in this format I doubt it will catch on for home use (aside from the $150K price issue).

  • Pianolas. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Richard Kirk ( 535523 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @08:02AM (#3700112)
    This is not a new thing. All these issues were thrashed out when punched paper roll player pianos were made.

    The early player pianos were simple mechanisms. There was no loud and soft controls other than the pedals, so the only way of varying the intensity of the sound was by playing the notes more often. You could not repeat notes too quickly or the roll might tear along the dotted lines, so the players used an octave tremolo style that gave these performances a very distinctive sound. Plus, the machines used to live in bars, so the tuning was sometimes rough, and beer got spilled inside.

    Forget them. The Ampico series B used to have 16 levels of force behind the hammers, with separate settings for the 'left hand' and 'right hand' (not individual key control, but not bad for the time). The speed of the hammers was recorded using the spark-gap timing techniques used for measuring bullet velocities, a spin-off from the armament industry for WW1. Stick a roll in one of these beasts, and close your eyes, and it's just like being at a performance. Even a CD player and hedphones has trouble sounding this good. The downside was they cost a few thousand pounds, which in its day would buy you a street of houses.

    Recording was not fully automatic. People needed to exercise judgement over how to convert things like the key velocities into the 16 pressure settings. There were also some sequences of rapid notes that could not be reproduced accurately. However, they could play the roll and log the timings, and edit it until the timings got as close as possible to the original performance.

    So, is it live? Well, back then they decided there was no risk of duff notes, and you don't have the actual performer present, so it was definately not live, but in some respects it was better. Same would be true today, I guess.

  • Nuance is the essence of music (Score:4, Interesting)

    by reddawnman ( 522025 ) <[moc.liamtoh] [ta] [jblyehyeh]> on Friday June 14, 2002 @08:19AM (#3700167) Homepage
    Beware, I'm a jazz musician, so I hold no credibility among people who work for a living...

    The claim that 127 bits is enough, or that any digital device 5000 miles away can qualify as a live performance is pure bunk, and Yamaha is notorious for this kind of garbage (Am I the only one who remember's their jazz band full of WX-7 wind synths that they said would be "revolutionary?")

    Simply put, the energy one puts forth when playing is not there when a computer is shoving down the hammers. I will admit:

    1: 127 bits will get a pretty good velocity vector for the hammers. I'm sure whatever checks they have to determine dampers coming back on,etc are sufficient to not make it sound comical.

    2: From a technical standpoint, it's a great achievement to do what Yamaha has done. It is really leaps and bounds ahead of most things out there.

    BUT

    that being said, where's the energy? where's the breath of life that you put into the instrument every time you play. Where's Vladmir Horowitz playing a sold out concert in moscow looking like he's calmy sitting and waiting for a bus while lambasting an opressive communist regime through the music? Where's keith jarret groaning and Philly Joe Jones responding when he belts out a solo? Allow me to indulge in an Anecdote (Courtesy of Kenny Werner's excellent book, Effortless Mastery)

    "I went to Bill Evans' 50th birthday party. So many pianists were in attendance, it looked like a dictators convention. Many people played for Bill, at a piano that will remain nameless. This brand of piano has a tendency to sound bright (pop-ish is the easiest def. i can give... Paul simons electric pianos are bright... most acoustic jazz stuff (herbie hancock...) is not). All the pianists who played said piano sounded that way. Then Bill sat down to play, and he sounded dark, rich and full, on the exact same piano. Looking at his hands, the wrists were like shock absorbers. when he "dropped his fingers" (Dont worry about the def. unless you play), he had a special way of accelerating them so full yet rich force was achieved, so his whole arm / hand weight would keep the hammers where they needed to be."

    Now, does the disklavier have that enrgy, that intensity? I don't think so. The point is that it's not a digital thing, playing an instrument. Trying to quantize "Soul" of music is counterproductive, and although being able to reproduce sounds in the way yamaha has been working is a great step, calling it a "live performance," and having a competition where the MIDI (sorry, disklavier...) interface records the velocities (Even if it is not recorded sound, in a way, it is a recording), is not under any definiton a live performance.
    • I hear the argument all the time- tube vs solid state, CD vs MP3 (with hi bit rate) vs Live,
      live in a cheezy bar with a moron sound guy, live in a huge stadium built for basketball, live on acoustic guitar three feet away from you, or a cheap radio shack audio tape that's been copied 4 times (4 gen loss) played on a crappy tape recorder with one 5 inch paper cone speaker.

      I think it's all bunk. Some performances sound better with the crackle and hum of a radio, some sound great on a component speaker system, and some sound damn fine on a fisher price toy.

      5 different judges hear five different performances, based upon where they focus their attention, how much hearing loss they've sustained over time (limits their freq response sensitivity) and heck, even the mood they are currently in.

      If all the judges were "telecommuting" I would say they are missing out. But having one judge telecommute in? I think by removing one facet of the performance that forces the judge to see the same "live performance" (its done in one take. it's live. we could argue this point for hours.) in a different light. In the same way a blind judge is going to have a different performance even though they are sitting right next to you.

      Probably its more of a novelty thing having this judge telecommute in. The "music community"
      is far too obssessed with sonic purity and the environment impacting on the performance for it to take hold. Truth is, things sound better when you have to get dressed up, drive out, park your car (or valet), stand in line, and sample in the "electrically charged" environment of a crowded room.

      But when the power is knocked out, and you have a candle and a 4th generation tape of Tom Waits on the tape recorder your french teacher used to have...
      all you need to do is add the girl. And that beats out most of the live performances I've seen.
    • I am also an (aspiring) jazz pianist. I have a Disklavier (the MPX1Z to be exact) and agree its playback cannot capture the nuances of a live performance.

      I never bought my Disklavier for playback, however. One reason I bought it was as a learning tool... I find its very helpful to record things when I practice and then listen to them afterwards. It gives me a third-person perspective of my playing.

      I also have the silent model, where I can mute the keyboard and play with headphones on. I live in an apartment, and this feature allows me to do alot of late-night practicing, which I tend to do. The tone is of course not that of a real acoustic piano, but the ACTION is, and that's what's important to me while I'm practicing.

      At 24, I'm starting jazz later than I'd like, but my Disklavier is helping me play catch-up just a tad. I plan to sell it and buy a nice shiny C7 several years from now. :)

      PS: Bill's my absolute favorite - great choice as an example. I thought his piano was a Kawai if I remember right. ;)

  • Bosendorfer (Score:3, Informative)

    by cporter ( 61382 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @08:31AM (#3700211)
    Bosendorfer [boesendorfer.com] makes the 290SE reproducing piano, which operates on the same concept as the Yamaha Disklavier system. Many experts seem to agree that it far exceeds the Yamaha system.

    I don't know about its use in virtual concerts, but I have a set of CDs of all 32 of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas that were recorded in a single weekend [onhifi.com] (that's 10 CDs!) by concert pianist Robert Silverman. Silverman believes the system records his performances with such fidelity that its playback is equivalent to his presence at the keys. I can attest these Sonatas [stereophile.com] sound wonderful. The engineering behind this piano and recording system is quite a story. [stereophile.com]

    The Bosendorfer technology has also been used in recreating performances [player-care.com] by Sergei Rachmaninoff [amazon.com] from original player piano rolls on the two CD volumes "Window in Time". It's amazing hearing the great Russian composer and pianist playing his own works (and works of others) on a new CD when he's been dead for almost 60 years.

  • Jelly Roll Morton's Piano Rolls (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jamie ( 78724 ) <jamie@slashdot.org> on Friday June 14, 2002 @08:44AM (#3700272) Journal
    One of the CDs I picked up recently was Piano Rolls [cheap-cds.com] by Jelly Roll Morton. He was one of the kings of ragtime back in the days before the electric microphone had been invented. He was a powerful, arrogant, flashy player who would often make a living by moving from town to town in Louisiana and challenging local players to a "duel." (No RIAA back then! I'm not quite sure what the revenue model was for having a hoedown with some honky-tonk player, but apparently he made it work.)

    No really good-quality audio recordings of his best work exist, he was born too soon. But we do have digital recordings: piano rolls he cut for player piano while he was at his prime. Five years ago or so, some smart people found some of those original piano rolls, scanned them into the computer, and converted them to MIDI files. Any adulterated roll-holes that the publisher might have added were removed -- at the time, player-piano publishers often took a razor blade and cut extra holes to make it sound like their artists had more hands. And subtle dynamic variations were added by hand to each note, since a player-piano roll has only one note attack volume (which at the time was often crudely modulated on playback anyway). As the liner notes say: "Converting Morton's old 78 recordings to computer data, we were able to study them from myriad standpoints of tempo, melodic shaping, accentuation, swung rhythms, chord voicing, and pedaling."

    Then they played the files on a Disklavier in a concert hall.

    It's eerie to listen to. It's this guy who was born in 1885, actual recordings he made in 1920, and it sounds... brilliant. You're not used to hearing jazz pianists from that era in CD quality on a great piano. Suddenly you realize that the 1920s did not sound like the 1920s to the 1920s. It's like seeing photographs a hundred years ago in color [loc.gov] -- your mind knows better, but your senses go: whoa.

  • The First Genius of Digital Composition for Piano (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Conlon Nancarrow's 'Studies for Player Piano' (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000031W5A ) were created from the early fifties onward. The actual idea for such compositions dates from one of Henry Cowell's essays from the 30's. One of the first pieces, Study No. 3a-e, "The Boogie Woogie Suite," often surprises new listeners in how much like human performance and jazz improvisation these pieces sound. Nancarrow did not record players on a player piano recorder for these pieces - he hand-punched the rolls them himself. His wonderful compositions, range from jazz, flamenco, 'six-minute' concertos, temporal counterpoint, waterfalls of chords and glissandos, and truly 'out there,' but joyously beautiful creative music. These works and his brave exploration of the limits of human aural perception make him one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He also 'hacked' the player piano, using a custom-made punching machine that allowed him to punch holes *anyplace* on the roll.

    He is truly one of first and greatest digital composers.

    Some of his compositions have be 'ported' to the Disklavier and there was a live performance of them a few years ago at the Knitting Factory in New York.
  • If you can give the girl(s) instructions, it's live. In a booth, over the internet, it doesn't matter.

    All this culture crap might as well be a DivX.

    Seriously - a true virtuoso, a real master, adjusts the sounds she makes (okay, one more joke) to take into account the accoustics of the room and the particular accoustics of the individual piano she's playing. If the Piano is in Japan and she can't hear it, and can't hear the room it's in, I think that would subtract something from the performance of someone who plays at this level.

  • Authenticity (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Smallest ( 26153 )
    For me this doesn't bring up the question of "live" vs "not live"; instead, it reminds me that authenticity is becoming more and more rare.

    I understand that this is an intersting technical accomplishment, but I'm not looking forward to world of remote performances. Maybe it's just me, but I feel there's something inauthentic about it. I'd much rather see a person play a real piano and hear the sound of that piano directly (or amplified, by necessity). If that means I see fewer piano recitals (because of seating issues, time issues with the performers, etc), then that's OK - it makes those that I do see that much more special.

    -c

  • Article: Antheil's Ballet Mécanique on Disklavier (Score:3, Informative)

    by stereoroid ( 234317 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @09:31AM (#3700468) Homepage Journal
    An excellent article appeared in UK Music Magazine Sound On Sound [sospubs.co.uk], by musician Paul D Lehrman, who used Disklaviers to produce the first ever performance of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique [antheil.org]. For 75 years after its composition in 1924, it could not be played in full, due to the limited technology available for all that time. Lehrman's SOS article appears in 2 parts: Part 1 [sospubs.co.uk] and Part 2 [sospubs.co.uk].

    The most relevant part of the articles to this thread is the descriptions of the problems Lehrman had with the Disklaviers, most significantly the time delays between MIDI input and sound production, and how Yamaha's compensation mechanisms got in the way, a bit. Probably not a problem here, since the competition is based on MIDI files, but still quite interesting. The antheil.org site has links to all sorts of related topics, including player piano music.

  • Being a Piano or a Flute or a Double Bass, The interaction with the instrument is assently analog in nature. When you press a key on a piano the power you press the key and the speed you do it all gives different effects and a good ear can tell the difference between a true finger press on a real piano and to break it into 127 bits of data leaves a lot to be missing. I am sure it will give a close aproxmitation of that the performer is doing but not enough.

    There is also a situation where the perfermer must adapt to the instrument. No instrument are the same. It takes practice and skill to work with a different instrument and to adjust on the fly to make it sound just right. On a piano a key could be a little harder to hit or softer to hit to get the right sound. Sure this idea has its uses say give a recording from a distance away. But for live performance It wouldnt be just right.

  • Update: loss of judge (Score:2, Informative)

    by meridoc ( 134765 )

    The competition's lost one of the judges [startribune.com].

    • Dunno if I'd call it an "update," seeing that it's mentioned in the linked NYTimes article:
      Mr. Bronfman's colleague and New York neighbor, the pianist Emanuel Ax, had originally agreed to join him in Japan as a second e-judge. But Mr. Ax pulled out a few months ago, he said in a recent interview, because of a scheduling conflict.

  • I agree with the other folks here. This ain't a live performance by any stretch. Besides the obvious limitations of MIDI (127 volume levels), and the fact that the pianos are different (the performer is in a feedback loop with Piano #1, if Piano #1 is a little too bright or too quiet in certain registers, the performer will adjust so the piece sounds right to him/her). Besides all these things, you don't get to watch the performer play.

    I recall a story about a piano teacher who played a note with her hand, and with the end of her umbrella, with the student's eyes open and closed. What they found out was that even though notes played with the umbrella and the hand sounded the same to the students with their eyes closed, the notes "seemed" to sound different with their eyes open.

    Probably because in their minds, the umbrella note was devoid of emotion, while the hand note wasn't, even though technically, it didn't make a difference how the key was pressed. Also when a person is sitting at the piano, they themselves are giving a performance, through their attitude, their body motions, their facial expressions, even through how much they sweat or what they're wearing.

    All of this is gone when you here a MIDI recording. The Disklaviers are damn cool instrument (I play the piano and I've been wanting to buy one for years) but it shouldn't be used like this!

  • Anyone attending? (Score:2, Informative)

    by V_drive ( 522339 )
    I'll be attending the e-competition both tonight (6:00pm) and tomorrow night (7:30pm). I may attend Sunday, but probably won't. Tomorrow has all the MUST SEE pieces for me. I'm a huge geek and in geek circles, but I've also played the piano for 17.5 years now (I'm 24 now) and none of my geek friends are into this kind of thing. Anyway, I thought it may be fun if a group of cultured slashdotters grab some of the cheaper tickets and split parking expenses. I just called the ticket office and there are plenty available. Can't guarentee if/how this will work out, but I thought I'd send some last-minute feelers out there. Write to piano_e_competition@yahoo.com if interested and I might see you there!
  • <disclaimer> My father is a Yamaha Concert Artist and owns two Yahaha pianos (neither Disklavier-equipped), on one of which I completed most of my piano studies before the age of 14. I also own a non-Disklavier Yamaha piano, and I like it. I sang professionally for eight years and have significant experience with the playback capability of the Yamaha Disklavier system. </disclaimer>

    I have yet to hear a Disklavier performance that I was able to distinguish from the original performance. The critical difference from most other forms of reproduced music is that an actual piano is reproducing the performance, not a system of amplified loudspeakers. Although no one has produced evidence for this instance in support or detraction, I imagine it would be very much in Yamaha's interests to ensure the performing and judging pianos were quite close to one another in timbric character. I know from personal experience that Yamaha have the resources and dedication to match the pianos to below human interpretive tolerance, if they believed doing so were to their corporate benefit.

    That said, I prefer live performances myself, and no, I don't know exactly why. I like seeing the performer, breathing the same air, hearing the notes ring out at the same instant the performer is hearing them.

    An objective, professional judge with years more education and years more experience than I might have a different opinion. Evidently this judge in question has. I defer to his/er professionalism, and I further have the temerity to suggest many of us would do well to follow suit.

    So there.
  • It would be very educational to take a recording of the original performance, on the first Disklavier, and also take a recording of the replayed performance, on the second Disklavier. If the recordings are digitized and subtracted, that should give a very good understanding of:
    1. The differences between the two physical pianos
    2. The portions of the performance that are not captured by the Disklavier's sensors.

    Would be interesting...
  • This totally defeats the point of live performance.
    How does the audience acknowledge the performer? I remember giving half-hour piano performances where I'd have applause between works. One could argue that this disrupts the performer and interferes with the musical output; in reality, nobody ever performs the way they practise (in private, perhaps) due to the differing state of mind.
    Without an audience, there is simply no adrenaline, leading to a more casual performance -- there's less of a tendency to pour emotions into your music, sometimes even at the relatively negligible cost of technical errors. Due to the mental exhaustion of practising like this, nobody really does it until they're in "performance mode". On a more pragmatic note, one of the issues performers deal with is the acoustic environment in which they play. Virtual performances do away with this...

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