A Brief(er) History: Gould’s Hologram

This post is part of my attempt to port my master’s thesis into blog form. Over the next [arbitrary and probably long amount of time], I’ll be posting longer-form pieces that track the various themes of the thesis, from the dominance of the speaker/microphone paradigm to the use of scientific rhetoric by 1920s player piano laboratories. I’m hoping they’ll be intelligible on their own, but as they go up, you can see them all together in chronological order here. You could also skip ahead and download the real deal PDF. This first installment is more or less directly copied from my introduction—a description of an unusual Glenn Gould concert.

Zenph Studios: Making Pianistic History

“I was totally wowed,” a woman in the audience told CBC News. “The only thing missing was a hologram of Gould actually playing.” ^[1]

In 2006, on what would have been Glenn Gould’s 74th birthday, in the studio named after him at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, Zenph Studios produced a concert featuring his performance of the work that launched his career when he recorded it for Columbia Masterworks 50 years previous: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Variations, published in 1741, had been considered esoteric harpsichord music until Gould’s interpretation on the piano revived them for a modern audience—an aria and 30 short contrapuntal variations on its bass theme. Zenph’s concert was unusual in many respects, but two facts suggested that it should not have happened at all: Gould famously abandoned live performance at the age of 31, and he died at 51.

[Photo from concert via Mark Manring]

The bench in front of the 9-foot grand piano was empty, as was an adjustable wooden chair upstage—a replica of the chair Gould always sat on when he played. Atop another piano bench downstage was a small computer with a glowing green LCD screen—a cable ran from it to the underside of the piano. A copy of Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations record leaned against the front of the bench. With no one on stage, the piano began to play—in Gould’s unmistakable style—the opening Aria of the Variations.

The concert was not a séance, but rather what Zenph Studios called a “re-performance”: 

Zenph® Studios takes audio recordings and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicating what was originally recorded. Our software-based process extracts every musical nuance of a recorded performance, and stores the data in a high-resolution digital file. These re-performance files contain the details of how every note in the composition was played, including pedal actions, volume, and articulations – all with millisecond timings. ^[2]

The piano was not an ordinary piano, but a Yamaha Disklavier Pro Mark III—a robotic piano that could, with the aid of the computer at the foot of the stage, play itself. Zenph’s team of human and technological listeners—algorithms, musicologists, analog-to-digital converters, pianists, microphones, and software engineers—had pored over Gould’s 1955 recording and had carefully constructed digital files that now sat in the memory of the on-stage computer. Although Gould was not seated at the bench, he seemed to be everywhere else: in the grooves of the record, the name of the studio, the replica of his chair, and in the few megabytes of data that ran through the cable and triggered the array of precision solenoids attached to the piano’s internal mechanism, or “action.” That “the only thing missing” seemed to be a holographic projection of Gould himself was a testament to the success of Zenph’s other projection: the motion of Gould’s hands and feet, pulled through time and space in thousands of precise measurements and reconstituted by the technological apparatus on stage.

The concert was, in a variety of ways, both a performance and a recording: The piano playing sounded very much like a live version of the recording it had been derived from, emerging from a real piano, in a conventional performance space, for a live audience. However, for Gould aficionados, the familiarity with which they heard every note was unusual for a live concert; they knew, in advance, how the notes would be played. It was a “re-performance” in that the piano reproduced Gould’s performance from the studio in 1955, but it was not that simple: Gould’s original record was peppered with tape splices that joined together disparate takes into a performance that never actually happened. If the re-performance was a copy, then where was the original? Was this concert even “live” at all?

The existence of re-performance raises interesting questions about the way we talk about liveness, recording, and performance and how this talk is shaped by technology. In the next installment, some thoughts about the language of music reproduction (or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Recorded Music).

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1. CBC Arts, “Software, robotic piano replicate Gould’s Goldberg Variations.”
2. Zenph Studios, “What is a Re-performance?”