We are proud to announce today the worldwide availability of Oscar Peterson: Unmistakable. The album, fourth in the ongoing collaboration between Zenph Sound Innovations and Sony Masterworks, is a collection of re-performances^® created from unreleased recordings Oscar Peterson made during the 1970s and 1980s. These re-performances were recorded anew at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in May of 2010.

Please visit a special page on our website with great stories about the making of the album, and photos from the recording session not found in the liner notes. You can purchase the CD directly from Zenph, or at most physical and online music retailers.

Like many people on the Zenph team, I am a professional musician in addition to my work in research and development. As a company, Zenph is confronting a number of challenging issues in the ongoing relationship between artistry, technology, market, and society. One reason I love performing, rehearsing, composing, even business administration with my two bands is that I am “down in the trenches,” personally experiencing these issues play out on the day-to-day instead of thinking abstractly about trends.

Two words we sometimes use to talk about how Zenph responds to the above-mentioned ‘web of issues’ are immersive and interactive. One facet of immersion with which I have always been fascinated is liveness. Liveness refers to enacting or experiencing an event as it happens in time and space, or to the qualities of such an experience. Going to a high school football game, seeing your favorite artist play at a local club. Certainly technology has shaped the role of liveness in the evolution from concert to recording, from theatre to television. In turn, perhaps society has come to expect the same from current live entertainment as we have been accustomed to in albums and films. Despite that our new expectations necessitate the use of technology, we often reject it; for example, the backlash in discovering that a pop star lip synchs to pre-recorded vocals on arena tours (even if only because it is too difficult to get a good sound from a microphone with all that dancing, running around, and loud noise). Other times, the use of technology is fruitful and even defines a new aesthetic.

Over the next few posts, I will divulge stories from history and today, stories from the news and from my own experiences with The Beast and Orquesta GarDel. Stories about how liveness has been improved by, altered by, or even destroyed by technology. I sometimes wonder if somewhere behind all these stories and paradoxes lies a human desire to reconnect to something. For ages, individuals and civilizations alike have used music to navigate life on this planet. I look forward to navigating together with you on this blog!

Eric is Coordinator of Research and Development at Zenph and a recipient of the 2010 ASCAP Foundation Young Jazz Composer Award.

Philadelphia, Academy of Music, circa 1974.  Fragmented childhood memories:

Mom got the tickets—in the top section, up by the ceiling.  Flat wooden bench seats with straight red velvet backs.  Smell of old wood and crumbling plaster. It was a big deal to go to the city for a concert—we didn’t do this often.  He played Chopin.  They presented a birthday cake on stage to him.  More Chopin.  The sound rattled my ears and pierced my heart.

Riding home in the back of the car I hid my face looking out the window—I was crying.  I didn’t know why—it was those sounds and what they did to me.  The sounds of Chopin, played by Artur Rubinstein were forever etched in my mind and imagination.  For years later: “Dear God, when he dies, can I have just a little—just a bit of what he has?”  Imagining that the magic of Rubinstein would somehow be released into the ether and channeled my way as a divine grace was a foolish child’s prayer, but the endless search to create beauty at the piano is my committed lifelong folly.

Fortunately, as solitary and sometimes foolish as the life of a pianist can be, the obsession with making the piano speak, sing, laugh, cry and scream at the heavens is shared by many people across the planet.  This blog will explore world of pianos, pianists, piano and chamber music repertoire, performing, music technology and the search for sublime experiences in assorted places (with occasional excursions into cycling!)   Please join in with comments, criticisms, and share your ideas. Welcome.

Phil enjoys the dynamic life of husband, father, performing pianist, cyclist, and fanatical music technology user. A member of the production team at Zenph, he considers himself incredibly fortunate to work with pianos every day.

Music isn’t just sound. It isn’t just entertainment, a form of communication, an industry, or dots on a page. It’s all this, and more.

It is also a set of human activities and behaviors, like learning, composing, performing, and listening. I think that this perspective is particularly helpful for understanding music. It opens the door to methods from psychology, neuroscience, physiology, gesture analysis, linguistics, sociology, and history – all of which can interact with and augment the toolsets of music theory and musicology.

Researchers around the world are using these and other approaches to tackle questions like what music means, how it works, and why we make and listen to it. Music is, and has always been, an important part of the human experience. In this space, I will discuss what we know about it, and what we have yet to learn.

Ives is a Senior Research Engineer at Zenph. He has a PhD in Music Cognition and an abiding love of the funk.