Seen and Not Seen

David and Régine take time off from PopMontreal to moonlight as lab rats:

There were a number of what looked like small project recording studios, and we settled into one with an upright piano in it. A young woman demonstrated that the piano was actually a Disclavier, a piano that “records” the performance of anyone who played it and then plays it back with the keys moving exactly as they had been played. One of the lab’s projects aims to get a sense of where the emotion, the feeling, lies in a performance. To do this they had a classical pianist perform a piece expressively and with feeling — we heard part of it played (or performed) back. They then used a program to remove all the feeling from the performance. It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well. Regine, who has some musical training, said it sounded like a 4 year old after a few piano lessons. To me this “dead” performance was also a faithful transcription of written music with no expressive markings. Much of Bach is like that, I believe, the expression left to the interpreter, but if played exactly as written it would sound like a machine. The limitations of musical notation.

Then the expressivity dial was turned to 50%. It still sounded pretty mechanical, but a little better. At 75% there was feeling there, but not played very well — “a promising student”, said Regine. But it took until 75% for the performance to begin to have what we would call feeling, expression, and humanity.

Then we heard the same performance with randomized expression — notes and time held and accented at random. We laughed, though some in the room thought it sounded eccentric, but good. Daniel said he thought only musicians would think it was interesting, because they have an acquired sense of how it’s supposed to be played, and confounding and surprising those expectations can sometimes make a piece even more interesting. I thought it sounded a little like Thelonious Monk.

This was at Daniel Levitin's lab. I've been meaning to check out his new book. Cognitive psych as it relates to music is an incredibly fertile subject, but I've been disappointed by most attempts to make sense of it, especially when it comes to books targeted at the general reader. I keep hoping for something like The Language Instinct for music, but the chapter in How the Mind Works on music and the arts is frankly embarrassing. But Levitin is both musician and a specialist in musical perception, so I'm guardedly optimistic about This Is Your Brain on Music.

The post also contains Byrne's thoughts on performances by Joanna Newsome and Danish band Under Byen, as well as a very nifty pie chart breaking down CD costs. Go read.