[CAUT] Compare, contrast, critique, anyone?

[Fred Sturm]

On Jun 6, 2008, at 8:30 PM, Kent Swafford wrote:

> Decades ago Rachmaninov recorded his arrangement of Flight of the  
> Bumblebee on a reproducer. Years ago Wayne Stahnke converted the  
> roll and others for a Telarc CD, Window in Time.

	Interesting, a fair number of removes from "reality," whatever that  
is. The reproducer is already an edited version. Conversion to MIDI  
is, I guess, fairly straightforward in that it isn't that much  
different from what is done by the people converting the marks on  
paper to punches in a reproducer roll.
	I don't listen to high quality speaker/amplifier systems often enough  
to have an ear for "piano tone" through them. It never sounds real to  
me through speakers, at least through the ones I listen to (especially  
the little laptop ones), so I guess I don't really listen with that in  
mind, but rather with a mind predisposed to "ignore and translate."  
Certainly the performance was "far too perfect," so I was assuming a  
player system of some sort (DIsklavier, Pianodisc), played in a  
variety of pianos, or with a variety of hammers.
	But this certainly does point out the dangers of sampling and  
modeling, used in conjunction with MIDI. A real pianist playing one of  
the virtual pianos will accommodate for voicing irregularities, or  
however we want to put that. Those accommodations won't translate to a  
different virtual piano. Which is not much different from saying a  
performance "captured" by a Disklavier or equivalent can only really  
be repeated on the same piano in the same condition, or one that is  
prepped virtually identically.
	IOW, technology is cool, but live performance is something quite  
different.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu