[Trombone-l] Fugue for Man & Machine

[Bill Dinwiddie]

I think that Mr. Johann Schodl will ultimately regret his actions.

BD




Fugue for Man & Machine

Classical musicians have bitterly opposed replacing human players with 
computers in the orchestra pit. Now, a small group is breaking ranks -- and 
arguing that it's the best hope for revitalizing the art. Cue the laptop.

Wall Street Journal
May 5, 2007
By JACOB HALE RUSSELL and JOHN JURGENSEN

Paul Henry Smith, a conductor who studied as a teen under Leonard Bernstein, 
hopes to pull off an ambitious performance next year: conducting three 
Beethoven symphonies back-to-back in a live concert. "Doing Beethoven's 
symphonies is how you prove your mettle," he says.

But Mr. Smith's proof comes with the help of a computerized baton. He will 
use it to lead an "orchestra" with no musicians -- the product of a computer 
program designed by a former Vienna Philharmonic cellist and comprised of 
over a million recorded notes played by top musicians.

Amid all the troubles facing the classical music world in recent years --  
from declining attendance to budget cuts -- none has mobilized musicians 
more than the emergence of computers that can stand in for performers. 
Musicians have battled with mixed success to keep them out of orchestra pits 
in theaters, ballets and opera houses. Now, a new alliance of conductors, 
musicians and engineers is taking a counterintuitive stance: that embracing 
the science is actually the best hope for keeping the art form vital and 
relevant. They say recent technological advances mean the music now sounds 
good enough to be played outside the touring musicals and Cirque du Soleil 
shows it is typically associated with.

Among their arguments: Aspiring composers who couldn't otherwise afford to 
have their creations performed by an orchestra can now commission a 
high-quality computer-generated recording for a fraction of the price. For 
communities facing the loss of their orchestra, it could be a way to keep 
performances in town -- even if it means a computer stands in for half the 
players.

Experts Judge Virtual Music

We played four samples of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 for two professors of 
music. Three were recordings of orchestra performances conducted by Roger 
Norrington, Fritz Reiner and David Zinman; the fourth was created on 
computer by Paul Henry Smith. We asked the professors to guess which was the 
computer recording. The results are below. David Liptak, chairman of 
composition department, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y. First 
guess: Incorrect. Picked the live performance conducted by Mr. Norrington as 
the computer-generated recording; Mr. Smith's was his second guess. Verdict: 
Mr. Liptak zeroed in on the "false" tone of the clarinet in Mr. Smith's 
recording. When he heard a longer sample, he said that it was easy to catch 
evidence that it was synthetic. Stephen Croes, dean of music technology, 
Berklee College of Music, Boston First guess: Incorrect. Mr. Croes also 
picked Mr. Smith's as his second guess. Verdict: "I'm not surprised at all 
that I could be faked out," he said. "The modern musician has tools that are 
so powerful, and they're looking for how to defeat all those giveaways." 
Critical to the push are new strides in computerized music. The latest 
software lets users pick from a massive library of digitally stored sounds, 
assemble them into a complete symphony and layer on texture and nuance. 
Picture a chef with an infinite variety of ingredients to choose from when 
creating a four-course meal.

Even some experts now find it hard to tell the difference. At the request of 
a Wall Street Journal reporter, David Liptak, chair of the composition 
department at the Eastman School of Music, listened to a 30-second passage 
of a Beethoven symphony created on a computer, as well as three versions 
recorded by live orchestras. On his first try at identifying the 
computerized version, Mr. Liptak guessed wrong. He says the difference 
became clear when he heard a longer clip.

In 2003, computerized music sparked a big battle in New York's Broadway 
theaters. Musicians went on strike for four days, partly because producers 
had raised the idea of replacing some players with "virtual orchestra" 
computer programs. Musicians' unions have largely kept virtual orchestras 
out of Broadway orchestra pits, but on London's West End, they have been 
used in productions such as "The Sound of Music" and Cameron Mackintosh's 
revival of "Les Misérables." They have also been used in some U.S. touring 
musicals.

But there's a big difference between theatrical productions where the 
performers are mostly hidden from view in an orchestra pit, and symphony 
concerts, where concertgoers expect to see the musicians front and center. 
So far, the technology hasn't been used in traditional orchestra settings, 
although some advocates say it could be used to bring classical music to 
small towns without resident symphonies.

Computers are also being used in some more experimental classical 
performances. In Toronto this fall, an audience filled a concert hall to 
hear Bach's "Goldberg Variations," performed by Glenn Gould
-- who died more than two decades ago. A company called Zenph Studios 
mounted the performance with a computer-controlled Yamaha grand piano that 
replicated the finger styling of the piano great.


Marin Alsop, incoming music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, 
says she supports the technology as a way for composers to get their music 
heard, but doesn't think it should replace working musicians. "It can be a 
great tool for moving up the ladder," she says. "But it's a slippery slope."

Headquarters for the high-tech music movement is the house in Hamden, Conn., 
where Mr. Smith, 43, lives and works. As a teenager, Mr. Smith spent summers 
studying under conductors like Bernstein at the Tanglewood Institute and 
Lukas Foss at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, N.C.; he received 
his bachelor's and master's degrees in music from Oberlin and Brandeis. In 
1995, he took a break from music to launch an Internet company, and later 
worked in Web development at Yale. In 2003, he bought his first edition of 
digital-orchestration software for about $5,000 and set out to pursue a new 
career.

Mr. Smith's studio is set up in a room that used to belong to his 3- 
year-old daughter (who's bunking for now with her 6-year-old brother). A 
silver keyboard is positioned in front of a computer monitor on his desk. To 
limit street noise and add a listening room for clients, Mr. Smith is 
planning to move the operation to a downstairs studio, which holds stacks of 
old music scores.


Mr. Smith has used computer programs to record themes for Nike and Adidas 
commercials, soundtracks for independent films and works by composers. He 
calls his business the Fauxharmonic Orchestra.

His main focus now is recreating Beethoven's symphonies on computer for a 
planned live performance, which he says he may conduct with a controller for 
the Nintendo Wii. He is making slightly unfinished recordings, so that on 
stage he will be able to interact with the music, modulating tempo and 
emotion. He says he has not yet secured a venue, but his goal is a fall 2008 
performance, preferably in Asia where he says attitudes toward combining 
technology with high culture are more open.

At work on Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Mr. Smith starts up a computerized 
rendition of the piece, which he's downloaded free online; it sounds roughly 
like a cellphone ringtone. Using a mouse, he selects a five-second snippet 
of a viola's part, which begins playing over and over in a loop. "This is 
what annoys everyone in the house," he says. With another click, he launches 
a digital library of recorded notes; for a single note there can be dozens 
of inflections to choose from. Mr. Smith selects "appassionata legato," or 
impassioned and smooth. The tinny tones are replaced with the sounds of a 
viola, which he tweaks further.


Keith Lockhart wears the 'conductor's jacket' in concert. Five minutes have 
elapsed, and he has created five seconds of realistic-sounding viola music. 
Next, he'll need to repeat the process for other instruments, including the 
flute, oboe and bassoon. Beethoven's Seventh includes 18 musical parts, 
performed by as many as 70 players.

For Mr. Smith, this will be a work of art. But that's clearly not the view 
of the person who put an anonymous posting on Mr. Smith's Web site: "This 
man is evil. This project is evil. Die in hell." Mr. Smith responds that the 
advance of computerized music is inevitable, and that musicians are better 
off taking control of it than leaving it in the hands of producers and 
executives. "The genie's out of the bottle and you can't just outlaw it," he 
says.

He has founded a group called the Digital Orchestra League, aimed at 
bringing together leaders in virtual music. Two of the league's board 
members are controversial figures in the music world, Frederick Bianchi and 
David B. Smith, co-founders of Realtime Music Solutions. Their company is 
the maker of Sinfonia, a computer system that replaces some live musicians 
in the pits of Cirque du Soleil shows.

Teresa Marrin Nakra models the 'conductor's jacket' Teresa Marrin Nakra, 
another league member, is considered a pioneer in digital orchestra 
technology. She is best known for an invention dubbed the "conductor's 
jacket," which she began designing as a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology. The "jacket" -- a cyclist's jersey embedded with a 
dozen sensors -- maps conductors' movements and physiology. It measures 
everything from the flexing of a bicep to the electrical conductivity of the 
conductor's skin -- a gauge of excitement used in lie detectors. With the 
data, Ms. Nakra has created software that recognizes these movements and 
translates them to control a piece of music.

Keith Lockhart, conductor of the Boston Pops and the Utah Symphony, has 
donned the jacket in performances to help gather data. He says he's 
interested to see where the technology will lead, but has some reservations 
about its uses. "What makes an orchestra extraordinary is not just one 
person's creative take on a composition, but watching the interaction 
between musicians and the conductor and each other," he says. "That's 
subtle, but once you start removing it from the scene, that's when you start 
forgetting it was there."

Last year, Mr. Lockhart strapped on the jacket for a performance of the 
overture of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro," but this time Ms. Nakra also 
placed sensors on five of the 75 musicians he was conducting, as well as 15 
audience members. The goal was to see how precisely Mr. Lockhart's movements 
matched his players', and how the emotional peaks of the music affected them 
physically. Ms. Nakra is still crunching the data -- the first two minutes 
of the piece alone fill 16 feet of paper with spiky lines -- but already she 
can see points where heart rates raced during passages Mozart intended to be 
loud.

This is a difficult time for American orchestras. Their numbers have dropped 
slightly in recent years, to about 350; since 2002, nine orchestras have 
shut down, while about five have opened or resumed, according to the 
American Symphony Orchestra League.Meanwhile more graduates are filing out 
of music schools. Some, finding few openings at traditional orchestras, are 
turning to less traditional pursuits, from film scoring to marching-band 
music.


For a budding composer, the economics of a virtual orchestra are compelling. 
Matthew Fields, who has a doctorate in composition from the University of 
Michigan but now works as a computer programmer and writes music on the 
side, has spent $50,000 on a professionally produced recording by 18 
musicians. Last year, he commissioned a recording from Mr. Smith's 
Fauxharmonic Orchestra for his complex six-minute work, "Fireheart," for 
about $800.

As a composer, getting players interested in his work is essential for 
building a reputation, Mr. Fields says. Without the recording, the piece 
"would simply be dismissed as unplayable and unworthy of playing," he says.

Music experts -- and even the biggest advocates of virtual- orchestra 
technology -- say a trained ear can typically tell computer-generated 
classical music from the real thing. Daniel Kellogg, a professor of music 
composition at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said he had no trouble 
recognizing a recording made by Mr. Smith as the work of a computer, in part 
because the woodwinds sounded the same every time. "There wasn't enough 
imperfection, " he said.

Mr. Smith says the technology still has limitations, but points to its 
dramatic improvement in recent years, and says he expects that it will 
rapidly become more realistic.

One of the people most responsible for recent strides in computerized music 
is Herb Tucmandl, formerly a cellist with the Vienna Philharmonic. He 
commands a small army of software engineers, recording technicians and 
freelance classical musicians, all working on the Vienna Symphonic Library, 
his digital archive of notes and musical patterns. A single note -- a violin 
playing a C- sharp, for instance -- is recorded hundreds of times; engineers 
edit that selection down to a few dozen.

Mr. Tucmandl pays musicians he knows from the Philharmonic, as well as other 
Viennese soloists and chamber musicians for the recordings. He says it took 
two years to record the samples for a solo violin, spanning 200 three-hour 
sessions.

For a musician, this would seem to be the ultimate conflict of interest --  
helping to build a computer program that could one day eliminate one's own 
job. But Johann Schodl, a 39-year-old Austrian musician who has recorded 
trombone, euphonium and other horn parts for the library, says he doesn't 
see it as a threat to his livelihood. Live performing gigs are still 
relatively abundant in Europe.

Mr. Schodl says he was paid about $140 for each three-hour recording session 
for the digital library. He adds that he has often made more in a week of 
recording for the program than he would in a typical week of rehearsals for 
a European orchestra.

There have been other benefits, too, for Mr. Schodl, such as mastering the 
control to emit a perfect note while also quelling the sound of wind from 
his horn or his tongue. "It made me a better player," he says.


Forwarded by Bill Dinwiddie
billdin at comcast.net