4 ms·

I absolutely adore Gould, and while he's known for his Bach, I'd recommend his Mozart interpretations to better understand what makes him so unique and controve

I absolutely adore Gould, and while he's known for his Bach, I'd recommend his Mozart interpretations to better understand what makes him so unique and controversial. The irony of your "player piano" statement is that his famous 1955 Goldberg variations were redone by a company called Zenph to demonstrate the power of their software to re-perform any performance. Probably Gould was chosen because he's so famous and I _think_ the recording was in the public domain and convenient, but also Gould actually has a lot of idiosyncrasies that make his playing instantly recognizable and if anything more human.

jacquesm 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOD1p4dGbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOD1p4dGbs That's a nice technical accomplishment (and probably it was very hard to get it to this stage). It makes me wonder if you had had Gould on a Yamaha Disklavier and recorded the MIDI stream how the two would compare.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  Probably one of the main differences would be due to re-digesting the MIDI back into sound. I think Zenph's tech actually plays the piano and physically records it. For MIDI, you'd probably use samplers like NI's Kontakt, and while the huge amount of collections available on that platform definitely are closer to real-world sound and variability, if you're just bouncing the raw to audio without re-recording in a physical space, there's probably at least some number of people who could tell the difference. I think there are physical modeling-based VSTs and instruments available, but it's been a really long time since I looked into that space. The biggest difference is that I'm sure if you introduced Gould to the world of MIDI and DAWs he probably wouldn't stop fiddling with it for months or years. Even back in the 60s and 70s I think he was well known to obsess over his recordings, and his practice of occasionally splicing performances to get the best from each take was/is pretty controversial. The irony also being that he was notoriously a pain to record because he often sang overtop his playing.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    The hard part is the pedaling. As they say about Gould: when Gould plays 'x' you don't get 'x', you get Gould :) Super interesting man and amazing pianist, extremely opinionated and definitely not to everybody's taste. Some of his work I love and some of it I can't listen to without being irritated so I get why there are people that do not like it at all.
wackget 4y ago
They should really do this for Keith Jarrett. As bad as Gould's vocalisations are on his recordings, they're absolutely nothing compared to Jarrett's. I literally cannot listen to Jarrett's piano recordings because the noises he makes just infuriate me.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >I literally cannot listen to Jarrett's piano recordings because the noises he makes just infuriate me. That's jazz, baby
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  Personally, I think Jarrett is grossly under-appreciated. That dude can play.

jacquesm 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOD1p4dGbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOD1p4dGbs That's a nice technical accomplishment (and probably it was very hard to get it to this stage). It makes me wonder if you had had Gould on a Yamaha Disklavier and recorded the MIDI stream how the two would compare.

lofatdairy 4y ago
Probably one of the main differences would be due to re-digesting the MIDI back into sound. I think Zenph's tech actually plays the piano and physically records it. For MIDI, you'd probably use samplers like NI's Kontakt, and while the huge amount of collections available on that platform definitely are closer to real-world sound and variability, if you're just bouncing the raw to audio without re-recording in a physical space, there's probably at least some number of people who could tell the difference. I think there are physical modeling-based VSTs and instruments available, but it's been a really long time since I looked into that space. The biggest difference is that I'm sure if you introduced Gould to the world of MIDI and DAWs he probably wouldn't stop fiddling with it for months or years. Even back in the 60s and 70s I think he was well known to obsess over his recordings, and his practice of occasionally splicing performances to get the best from each take was/is pretty controversial. The irony also being that he was notoriously a pain to record because he often sang overtop his playing.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The hard part is the pedaling. As they say about Gould: when Gould plays 'x' you don't get 'x', you get Gould :) Super interesting man and amazing pianist, extremely opinionated and definitely not to everybody's taste. Some of his work I love and some of it I can't listen to without being irritated so I get why there are people that do not like it at all.

wackget 4y ago

They should really do this for Keith Jarrett. As bad as Gould's vocalisations are on his recordings, they're absolutely nothing compared to Jarrett's. I literally cannot listen to Jarrett's piano recordings because the noises he makes just infuriate me.

ramesh31 4y ago
>I literally cannot listen to Jarrett's piano recordings because the noises he makes just infuriate me. That's jazz, baby
poulsbohemian 4y ago
Personally, I think Jarrett is grossly under-appreciated. That dude can play.