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  • From: Michael Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Zenph Studios?
  • Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 16:13:18 -0500


On Feb 16, 2005, at 3:34 PM, Sil Greene wrote:

That's not a description, that's the biggest load of marketing manure
I've seen in a while. OK, maybe not the biggest, but "Rachmaninoff,
Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Fats Waller, and Thelonious Monk can literally
play 'live' again"?? please. unless they've managed to perfect
resurrections, this statement is patently false, and it aids any other claims about their technology straight into the "useless" category.

They don't say what, if any proprietary technology is being used, but *if* they had a pitch to MIDI system that worked exceptionally well they could analyze a solo piano performance from an old recording, convert it to MIDI, and then play it back on one of their nice pianos and make a nice clean new recording. My old consulting company www.musclefish.com developed a pitch to MIDI system that was used in a major digital audio/MIDI recording program; its difficult enough to get a solo pitch detector working, and I would be very surprised if they solved the polyphonic pitch detection problem. Of course restricting the problem domain to a single instrument helps tremendously.


so basically they've taken fine concert pianos and turned them into
midi controllers, and their breakthrough is that instead of each
keypress generating one midi event, it generates seven. higher
precision makes sense but sounds a little ... empty, compared to
the marketing claims.

There's been lots of player pianos through the ages. My very first consulting gig (Circa 1987) was taking a proprietary recording/playback system that Bosendorfer was using and writing MIDI conversion utilities that would encode the extra information into the MIDI stream, while maintaining MIDI compatibility. Bosendorfer was convinced the extra resolution in their system would make their recording/playback system superior, but the proprietary DOS software they had was terrible, and being proprietary there wasn't an incentive for anyone else to create improved software.

Zenph is using a Yamaha Disclavier Pro (who I also worked for). The Disclaver Pro already doesn't everything described in terms of recording and playback, so as far as I can tell its just a service using a nice room and a purchased Yamaha player piano. Unless they've gotten ahold of the sensor specs and are doing their own encoding. If I remember correctly back when I was involved Yamaha had decided not to support the full range of the sensors because there wasn't any perceptual differences.

"Few pianists ever get to hear themselves play "live," another unexpected benefit of the process. They get to hear what they sound like "out in the hall." While the piano plays back their performance, they can sit in different chairs in the room and hear what the audience hears when they perform. It's a huge revelation; they often sit with their scores and mark up phrases, having heard what they actually sound like for the first time."

Come to think of it, back at Ohio State U. the music department purchased the Bosendorfer recorder/player piano and was doing this very thing back in the late 80s for the piano majors.

___________________________________________________________________
michael at czeiszperger dot org
Chapel Hill, NC USA





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