I heard about an exciting new development the other day that pushes the digital music revolution in a whole new direction.
According to this story on NPR, a company has now figured out how to re-record old recordings by digitally capturing the original performance on a digital piano. I don't mean they're cleaning up the old recordings by eliminating hiss and so forth, they're actually re-recording the performances, fresh, on a live piano, with the full acoustic advantages of listening to a live instrument. Only instead of Glenn Gould playing the piano -- he's dead -- it's played by a computer, which recreates his exact performance, based on a digital breakdown of the old recording: "It tracks exactly when each note was hit, how loudly, with what kind of attack, and when and how it was released."
I have no idea how good these recordings are but I think this is really cool. Some have compared this process to the "colorization" of black and white films, but I think that analogy is a poor one. This is not a tacky alteration of the original work, but a restoration of the original brilliance and clarity that someone sitting in the room with Glenn Gould would have heard. How exciting to have a shot at hearing that! I think a better analogy would be the restoration of the original bright colors on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The restoration might not be 100% exact, but it opens up the possibility of taking great additional pleasure in what is pretty close to the original art.
In addition to buying a CD recording of one of these "re-performances," I imagine that anyone with a properly equipped piano might soon be able to have a live performance right in their living room. You could hear a live piano playing the works not only of great pianists like Glenn Gould and Dinu LIpatti, but even of some composers playing their own works: Rachmaninoff, Satie, Prokofiev and many others (sorry, no Bach or Mozart).
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