Technology

Zenph® is creating building blocks for the musical equivalent of software you know from text and video graphics. Our first offering is a service where we take audio recordings (from any source: LPs, tapes, 78s, CDs, even wax cylinders) and convert them back into the precise, nuanced keystrokes and pedal motions that would have been used to create them. This is done in a new format which can be played back with phenomenal reality on corresponding high-resolution computer-controlled grand pianos. Rachmaninoff, Glenn Gould, and Art Tatum can literally play "live" again.

Implications for Music Production and Listening

Imagine musical software that's like the picture editor you use. A musician or recording engineer could take a high-resolution MIDI performance and work with it in their computer. Notes, phrasing, or pedaling could be touched up. Software could make the performance more delicate or sadder, for example. Our analytics let us see and study re-performances® as detailed computer data - literally seeing what our brains and emotions have reacted to for centuries. This opens a world of opportunity for creating natural-behavior algorithms.

We started with solo piano because of the high quality of the hardware for playback. Our same techniques can be readily applied to other instruments. How they're played back will evolve swiftly through the coming years, as the quality of virtual instruments and even robotic players improve.

Consider the potential for extracting “artistic DNA.” What distinctive things did Horowitz do that made him unique as a performer? We can compare his performances to original scores, his alternate takes, and even the playing of others - essentially "hold them up to the light" in the computer - and build a software template for Horowitz that might be applied to other musical scores.

Click here to read about the software development process at Zenph.

"A performance is now a renewable resource."
Eitan Cornfield, CBC radio documentarian