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Thursday, 17 February 2005
Deja entendu ::
I listened to Keith Jarrett’s Paris Concert for the first time in the car on the way to and from films in Berkeley over the weekend. A striking early impression was the sound of the piano and the room. It’s all one giant, gorgeous instrument. I zeroed in on this during one long passage with the sustain pedal down a lot of the time, with repeating phrases and variations with the same sets of notes. I got to thinking about a recent mailing list thread about sampled vs. real pianos.
This album is a perfect example of the inimitable sound of the real instrument. No two notes are the same; the vibration of every string is being affected by those of the others around it, how much the string was already vibrating when the hammer struck it again, and the reflections of the amplified sound from the walls of the concert hall.
In that mailing list thread, I’d written that a demo of a sampled piano sounded lifeless and flat. Most of the individual notes sounded fine on their own, but the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts; those interrelated resonances between the strings, the sounding board, and the room are missing. Not only that, but when the same key was struck twice in a short period of time, it was very clearly the exact same sound played twice. The ear seems to catch this very easily and perceive correctly that it is hearing more of a mechanical than an organic event. The attempt to create the effect of a real instrument playing many notes by assembling recordings of many single notes fails.
In the I Heart Huckabees Infomercial, which I saw Saturday afternoon, Dustin Hoffman asks Robert Thurman “what’s going on right now?” and Thurman’s response is “infinite relativity.” Indeed, like a real piano, with the innumerable interrelationships between the strings, body and pedals of the piano, the room (and bodies in it), and the performer’s fingers on the keys.
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