Pianistic Translations

In doing research on the player piano, a certain temptation has come up many times. Given the popularity of the phonograph as an object of academic inquiry (and the persistence of its basic working principles), it is basically mandatory that I compare the pianistic reproduction I’m looking at to phonographic reproduction.

So first, there is a question: What kinds of things am I comparing? I just called my topic “pianistic” reproduction, which is basically a working term meaning “with discrete notes and attacks, like a piano.” “Phonographic” reproduction, on the other hand, would mean “like a phonograph.” Basing my terms specifically on the technologies is not ideal: like a piano in what way? like a phonograph in what way? Jonathan Sterne did the hard work for the phonograph and ended up with “tympanic reproduction”—sound reproduction that is modeled on the eardrum (like all microphones and speakers). That seems to collect together iPods, phonographs, 8-track tapes, etc. in a meaningful way—based on a foundational shared principle. At the moment, my only parallel move would be to alter “pianistic” so that instead of referring to “piano” the technology, it refers to “pianism” the mode of engagement with keyboard instruments. This is a little obtuse, still working out terms, but I hope you get the idea.

Click through for a bunch of examples, after the jump.

The temptation that I brought up above is the temptation to set these two modes diametrically opposed to each other. So, I could say something like “On the one hand you have tympanic reproduction (analog, raw, natural, warm) and on the other, pianistic reproduction (digital, interpreted, synthetic, cold).” My recent reading has made me loath to endorse any kind of pure opposition, and as evidence of the interrelatedness  I have been building a little collection of what you might call “pianistic translations.” I’m sharing them here for your entertainment, and in the hope that this will inspire other people to join me in the hunt for “a word that is more general than pianistic, but not any less specific than it needs to be.”*

Marie Dominique Joseph Engramelle

Engramelle was a French priest who, in the mid-18th century, devised a system for adapting sheet music to the pinned barrels that stored the music for barrel organs, in his treatise La Tonotechnie, ou l’Art de noter les Cylindres.

This image is actually from a follower of his, Father Bédos de Celles, who in 1766 simplified Engramelle’s barrel notation, but you can get the basic idea. Why Engramelle counts as a translator (after all, adapting sheet music to be played on a musical instrument doesn’t seem to be a big deal) is because he was concerned with preserving the playing styles of live musicians—the details that were not contained in musical notation:

“The elaborate code of separation of notes down to the very smallest is claimed by Engramelle to be based on the playing of the finest artists of the day. […] We have, in the matter of articulation at least, a direct link between the analysis of a playing style and its realization on cylinders.” (Fuller 1983)

Of course the fact that Engramelle did this work for organs and not pianos is another strike against “pianistic,” but “keyboardly” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, right?

J. Lawrence Cook

Cook recorded piano rolls for the QRS company throughout the 20th century, and had an interesting way of adapting existing phonograph recordings to piano rolls:

Taking a pad of blank music paper, Mr. Cook seated himself in front of the console, turned it on and placed a 78 r.p.m. record of popular music on the turntable.  As the music began to play, he adjusted the volume and he began writing musical notes on the music lines of the blank paper.  He explained that first, he was writing down the trumpet notes.  At the end of the recording, he again replayed the same record and using a new sheet, began writing notes for the next instrument. He continued this until he had written the parts for each instrument contained on that record.

(via doctorjazz)

These transcriptions would be simplified to make them sound more “natural” on the player piano (paradoxically, some manipulation was necessary, even for live-recorded rolls, to make them sound “real”). Yes, he used phonographs as source material for piano rolls!

Olivier Messiaen

Composer Messiaen began, in the 1950s, to use bird songs as material for his compositions, transcribing their songs from walks in the woods and, for his Oiseaux Exotiques, from a 1942 collection recorded by the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell called American Bird Songs. This is a comparison of the spectrograph of the Cornell recording of a Wood Thrush and Messiaen’s score, from oliviermessiaen.org:

Messiaen’s score is of course an adaptation (birds, while they can sort of play guitar, don’t play piano). What is really interesting (to me at least) is to see the progression of Messiaen’s own notation, as he took the sounds out of bird-dom and moved them more into piano-dom. Here are his sketches for the Wood Thrush in order, from this excellent book on Oiseaux Exotiques:

That there is translation in progress! It’s too hard to put in audio clips into text Tumblr posts (1st world problem, I know), but you can listen to some excerpts of the American Bird Songs recordings and Messiaen’s final adaptations here, or watch Pierre Boulez conduct Oiseaux Exotiques here:

You can also watch the last half of Oiseaux Exotiques and two more videos on Messiaen’s birdsongs.

John Oswald

So far, these translations have all been interpretive. To turn sound waves in the air to key presses, a human brain had to get in the middle. For Messiaen, the interpretation is the whole point, and he obviously takes liberties with his source material, given that birds tend to not sound like pianos. For J. Lawrence Cook, on the other hand, translating a phonograph recording of a piano, obvious “interpretation” is minimized: changes he may make are due to the requirements of the player piano, not necessarily his artistic vision (although many would say he performed this task artistically).

John Oswald’s “Aria” is a different story. Taking Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Aria” from the Goldberg Variations, Oswald says in the liner notes,

We had a computer listen to Mr Gould playing the aria to the Goldberg Variations through a device which converts analogue pitches into digital notes. We fine-tuned or perhaps I should say finely untuned this ability so that the computer would hear approximately the right notes; it would add extra notes and spurious activity when it wasn’t sure what he had played. But it was good at getting most of the notes and the precise timing of the original. Once this info was collected into the computer it could be played back on any MIDI instrument or sampler. The sound could be electronic, or a toy piano or one of our klangprobes. But we had the opportunity to record a couple of the pianos Gould actually used, including the flagship CD318.

[…]

Then the computer gave us a real time performance of its interpretation and we recorded it.

Since I still haven’t figured out a good way to embed audio into text posts, you can have a listen to John Oswald’s ‘Aria’ over here.

Modern Miscellany

There are a number of applications to convert acoustic recordings into MIDI files (such as Digital Ear, IntelliScore, AmazingMIDI, AKoff Music Composer, and Transcribe!), and an audio-to-MIDI system can even be implemented in Max/MSP. Automatic tuning systems like Auto-Tune and Melodyne take this a step further, integrating the notational translation with audio processing to make the familiar stair-stepping hybrid voice.

The talking piano I blogged a while ago might also be seen as an example of this practice (although using the piano more for its ability to layer frequencies than for its ability to play individual notes):

And More to Come

The company whose work is taking up a big chunk of my thesis, Zenph Studios, does related work in converting acoustic recordings into “re-performances.” In the interest of ending this massive post and because I’m actually going to visit the Zenph Studios studio in NC this week (!), I’ll save more writing on them for another time.

cited:

Fuller, David. (1983). An Introduction to Automatic Instruments. Early Music, 11(2), 164-166.

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*Probably the biggest possible competing term at the moment is “melographic”, which dates back at least as far as Carpentier’s 1881 Mélographe Répétiteur piano recorder and derives from melo- (“music”) -graphy (“writing”). It is also used later on by musicologists like Charles Seeger (Pete Seeger’s dad!) around the 1950s to refer to devices for continuously transcribing the pitch of non-Western music basic on fundamental frequencies, a use which makes it a little less nice for my purposes—my kind of reproduction being fundamentally discrete.