Axehole

Every Friday, it’s WTF day at Axehole, where we bring you the strangest music news of the week, the one thing that makes you wonder, WTF?

Things like Microsoft’s Plan to Buy its Way into Your Pants, Stripper Ringtones & The Passion of the Jesus Guitar.

Picking this weeks WTF Friday item was a no-brainer. Zenph Studios, a music production company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is bringing the dead back to life….to play piano.

Many of the most memorable musical performances of all time are from piano masters of early and mid twentieth century. These recordings are typically monophonic, though, and often suffer from noise, clicks and other blemishes that modern ears are unaccustomed to.

Zenph Studios has created a process to analyze original performances and transform the pitches, dynamics and pedalling into MIDI information that can used to play a piano and create modern recordings of classic performances, bringing the dead back to life.

Zenph’s Technology

Zenph’s process captures performance information from archival recordings and translates it into MIDI information that can be used to create new recordings.

Here’s an example of what the technology can do. These two recordings were made in 1926 and 2005: “before” and “after” recordings by legendary pianist Alfred Cortot. He’s playing Chopin’s third prelude, lasting 50 seconds. The recordings offer a glimpse into what is possible when a performance can be separated from its original acoustical setting.

Before (MP3)

After (MP3)

Celebrated concert pianist Ruth Slenczynska studied with Alfred Cortot in the 1930s. Upon hearing Zenph’s new recording in August 2005, she wrote, “I’ve listened to your CD and certainly recognized his touch on the rendition of Opus 28 No. 3. French pianos 70+ years ago weren’t great and Mr. Cortot’s fingers were perhaps ‘creaky,’ but that was his sound and I loved it!”

Why Rerecord Dead Pianists?

Zenph’s process clearly offers an opportunity to take crusty old recordings and make them palatable to modern ears. While purists may prefer the originals, many listeners will prefer modern recordings, in stereo or even surround sound, and even consider this an opportunity to hear the performance in a new way.

Other reasons for rerecording dead pianists are purely business ones.

In the European Union (EU), recordings go into the public domain 50 years after their first release. Small recording companies in the EU already re-issue CDs of historical mono recordings in volume. In 2006, though, the situation gets troubling to labels. 1956 was the start of early stereo, so beginning in 2006, relatively good recordings start going into the public domain.

“The way around this is to create new, highly-desirable music recordings, which establish a new copyright,” according to Zenph. “A modern re-recording can be a premium product, protected with the latest Digital Rights Management (DRM). For a modern re-recording to be acceptable to discerning jazz, classical, and pop listeners, it must be faithful, note-perfect, and identical to the original performance. That’s our business.”

Probably the biggest reason for using dead pianists on a recording, though, is that they are known and marketable, so its less risky than recording live, but unknown pianists.