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Re: Gould or not?

Posted by Christine Tham (R) on April 11, 2007 at 15:01:37

In Reply to: Re: Gould or not? posted by Dave Garretson on April 11, 2007 at 06:34:31:

You *do* understand, don't you, that when you listen to a piano recording at home on your system, there is no pianist hitting any keys either, and in fact what you are hearing is not even a piano?

What's more, what you are hearing does not even bear any resemblance to what a human would hear at the venue?

Consider this. The sound vibrations generated by the strings is captured and converted into an electrical signal. Overlayed with the actual sound however are multiple relections generated by the venue itself.

When you play this recording on your system, the electrical signal gets translated into sound vibrations through a set of speakers. Overlayed on this sound are additional reflections generated by your room.

Your speakers are unlikely to be positioned in the same relative locations as the microphones so the reflected sound you hear captured in the recording are being played back in the wrong context. In addition, you are hearing two rooms superimposed on one another - a sound that never happens in reality.

And that's if you are listening to a straight capture of a live recording. If you are listening to a studio multi-track recording, then there is no such thing as the "original performance" - it's a synthetic creation.

Basically what you are listening to is a (relatively poor) simulation, a "recreation" or even reinterpretation of what may or may not have been an actual performance. And what you are listening to are not real musical instruments, they are sound waves created by speaker drivers, which do not disperse them in the same pattern as a real musical instrument.

Compared to this, when someone plays back a performance on a Disklavier, at least we get to hear a *real* piano, in a *real* acoustic space. Is it really "one step further into a synthetic environment" or is it in fact much closer to what a musical performance should really sound like?

As for Disklaviers displacing human performers, you realise that every time we listen to a recording instead of a live performance, we are "unemploying" far more pianists than a Disklavier would? Especially if we listen to the same recording over and over again.

If you are really interested in lost causes, sell your system and recordings. Subscribe to your local symphony orchestra and listen to as many live performances as you can.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Analog Engineering Associates

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