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Zenph Studio's Instrument Cloning Breakthroughs


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On this May 19th, in North Carolina, USA, a critically acclaimed Canadian pianist will perform one of his signature pieces, Bach's Goldberg Variations, last performed in 1955. But the catch is, the artist, Glenn Gould will not attend the recital. It's not that he doesn't want to. He can't. He died October 4th, 1982.

Instead, his signature 1955 performance will be re-produced by a robotic piano using a computerized play routine coaxed from an ancient recording to a degree of accuracy which was, until a year ago, thought to be impossible.

Zenph studios, which bills itself as having one of the finest performance spaces and the most advanced recording technology in the world, is responsible for this feat of death cheating. Their process is impressive.

First, an original recording is digitized at the highest possible quality. Then, their custom-designed software then models the exact combination of pedal, hammer velocity and impact angle, and timing needed to produce each note in the song. They claim their system is so robust that line noise, voices, or singing have no effect. The software records this data in a special MIDI format file which has 7 times the descriptive variables and 10 times the resolution of a standard MIDI file. Then, this file is "performed" by aYamaha Disklavier PRO Grand piano. Unlike the "roboplayers" you may have heard in Malls and Restaurants, this machine has orders of magnitude more precise movement and sensing, as well as separate CPUs for pedal and keyboard movement.

All this pulls together to deliver the impossible: Zenph claims that their system reproduces the actual performance of the musician, past the level of precision that the human ear can detect.

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