Facelift for Glenn Gould

Posted by Sarah Canice Funke May 31, 2007

Zenph, a North Carolina software company, has a new twist on the remaster: instead of taking an old performance and cleaning up the static, why not re-record the performance all together? The first project, ready for release, is a new version of Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. But Glenn Gould is dead, you say. How will Zenph be able to release a new recording of his performance?

The company has designed software that takes an original recording and reads the pitch, duration, attack intensity, and dynamics. The software is even sensitive enough to pick up acoustical variation. The program is then used to play an acoustic piano. The result duplicates minutely the original performance.

But with any new technology come questions of preference. If Zenph is going to all this trouble to preserve Gould's every artistic nuance, should it also preserve his mistakes? In the interests of artistic integrity, the company opted not to correct the wrong notes Gould played.

Yet the ability to correct wrong notes raises the question: should we do so? There are two sides to the question. To err is human. Recordings already "freeze" live performances, eliminating the dynamic variation that separates one live performance from another. To eliminate mistakes seems to remove the recording one step more from the living human.

Yet on the other hand, such a recording is not totally devoid of human involvement: the programmers are all responsible for the production of this music. Interestingly enough, however, because the emphasis is on one particular human (Gould), who no longer has any active input in production, the reproduction is viewed as a fossil, once a living thing but now gathering dust.

For further information and to hear clips of the original Glenn Gould recordings and the Zenph reproductions, please read the NPR story.