the differences would be even more evident at a higher resolution, the aliasing significantly alters much of the real sound: winds suffer almost as bad as percussion instruments. the thinness of the wind sound at 15-18" (ex. 1) is typical of lower quality compressed audio, and at these resolutions the poor quality of the sound gives the "fake" an unfair advantage. the omnipresence of mp3s and compressed audio playback units would actually benefit the development of "machine" performances, once the reference of the live orchestra played on decent-quality recordings on passable systems disappears (on an individual basis i mean).
the test would be (more) meaningful if they used a better compression format, or no compression at all. i have no doubt that the results -- even amongst less-experienced musicians/listeners -- would be radically different than with this crap sound. this said, there are enough clues independent of the crap sound. ("crap sound" should be spoken with a glaswegian accent by the way, i think it has more impact: "e's go'a crrap sound")
there are also a great number of recordings in the past 30 years (or so) of very mechanical performances, which lack the "vibrancy" (hate to use such a meaningless word to describe it...) of recordings with attention to the individual moments connecting notes. much has been written elsewhere about the effect the recording industry may or may not have had on this tendency, and on the effect the "competition" mindset has had on performers' flexibility in performance. in any case, i have no doubt that this could also contribute to the listener not recognizing the sterility of timeflow in the "fake".
similarly, the fact that so many students are working with computer programmes today and are not entirely aware of the differences in attack which characterize instrumental groups -- and differently in different registers and with hard vs. soft reeds etc. -- could help the "fakes" slip by, because any chordal entry is heard as a rigid block in synthesized playbacks. although the various "humanizing" plugins are built to offset this mechanicity, they do so in a very mechanistic manner, by (or rather within) a fixed percentage it would seem, so that the distribution of "humanness" is statistically equal... and therefore inhuman.
i love listening to mingus' works exactly for this, you only need to hear the entry of one chord and you know it is mingus, everyone is on the beat but there is no consensus as to WHERE the beat actually IS!
for physical reasons, this is actually built in to the string section, so would seem fairly easy to replicate in a relatively convincing manner in particular contexts, but it is something that is very difficult to fake in the rest of the orchestra, with far fewer instruments playing the same parts.
-- shirling & neueweise ... new music publishers mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] :.../ http://newmusicnotation.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
