Fooling the listener?

[twanguitar]

Sorry for starting a fresh topic, but I wasn't sure where to put this.  It concerns the fact that some of what we hear of organs (both pipe and electronic) on recorded media might not be heard in the original acoustic, or even not played by a human being at all.  'Media' includes everything from conventional CD's to web media such as YouTube. 

Starting with history, it has been the practice for some years (maybe decades) in the recording industry to make a master recording of a performance in one venue (usually that containing a pipe organ) and then add the ambience of another.  This was sometimes done by replaying the master through loudspeakers in a (different) reverberant auditorium and then making a secondary master with microphones, from which the actual recordings were then produced.  This had several advantages - if the original ambience was on the dry side it was much easier to edit the performance to remove blemishes at this stage.  This was, and is, often next to impossible with a wet ambience because of the long reverb tails.  Also, the quality of effects processors in the past left a lot to be desired (steel plates and the like), and a real auditorium sounded much better even though it required a second recording step with all the disadvantages that entailed (using speakers to re-radiate the sound, etc).

Today things have gone way beyond this.  Using MIDI, an organist can 'record' a performance on many pipe organs and almost all electronic organs merely in terms of key presses, stop changes, etc.  No sound is involved at this stage.  The resulting MIDI file can be edited in any way imaginable, not only to remove blemishes but to add or modify rubato, phrasing, etc.  The edited file can then be played back into the original (or indeed any other MIDI-compatible instrument) and recorded as sound.   In other words, no matter how good or bad the player was when making the original MIDI recording, you might not be hearing what he or she played but a grossly edited version of it.  And in all such cases, the final sounds were made by a machine, not a player at all.  None of this is usually made clear when you shell out good money for an organ CD.

It can get even worse than this.  MIDI files of almost the entire organ repertoire can be downloaded by the bucketful off the web for trivial sums, or even for free.  These can then be edited if one wishes before playing them into a MIDI-compatible pipe organ, a digital organ or an electronic virtual pipe organ.  Only the other day I found on YouTube an upload of a well known organ work claiming to have been "performed" by the CEO of a digital organ company.  Yet it was almost certainly a MIDI performance, to judge by the almost total lack of phrasing and articulation.  It was also noteworthy that not a single visual of him playing was included, only the pages of the score slowly turning as he ploughed through the piece.  This guy calls himself a "musician" on the company website, so wasn't it a bit odd that modesty forbade him showing himself sitting at a real console and doing a bit of playing?  It seemed to me that he was actually shooting a stream of MIDI into one of his company's products and calling it a 'performance'!!

Any comments?  Are we being fooled more often than we suspect by the recording and digital music industries?

TG

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

Both Facebook and YouTube have a "Like" button - there is something akin to this with the "applaud" link underneath a writer's name and I have certainly clicked on that one for you with this post!

I'm proud to have 2 negatives - which means that I have clearly ruffled a feather or two :-)

However, jesting about such matters apart, you raise an issue here which is very important - and actually it's for this reason that I promote live concerts and also live recordings and videos of live events on YouTube which I hope people enjoy and appreciate for what they are - real . . . . live . . . . music! But I wish people would come more to hear them in the flesh . . .

Best wishes

David P

[revtonynewnham]

Hi

This is not always true - but sadly is too often the case.  As a recording engineer, I know of many of the "tricks" employed - some work, others are only too obvious.  MIDI playback is a case in point - unless the file is produced by a real player with the auto-correction of timing turned off, it will never sound real - no matter how much other trickery is employed! Even worse if the file is assembled in "step time" - the all hope of phrasing and the subtleties is lost.

It is possible to edit recordings made in reverberant surroundings - if you know what you're doing, have a very good ear, and the player(s) give you the right material.

If a mistake is made, say, at bar 31 beat 3 and the player restarts at bar 31 beat 3, then the edit will never sound right without a lot of fiddling with artificial reverb (and probably not even then).  However, it the retake is started a few bars earlier, and the tonality matches across the join, then the edit can be inaudible. the secret is to cut where the edit will be masked by a change in sound - in light music, it's usually done on a drum beat or similar.  For classical music, you need to find - very accurately (and that's the difficult bit) the start of a note and cut and join there - hard on the starting transient.

Speech recording is MUCH easier (although the TV news reporters seem to have never been taught how to do it, given the number of glaring edits and hard cuts I hear these days!  Even then, there are certain speech edits that are impossible to do cleanly because of the patterns of speech, words run together, inflections, etc.

My recordings (You Tube & My Space) do have a handful of edits - mainly between sections (verse/chorus etc in the hymn arrangements)  most are pretty good, although one or tow you may be able to find.  The aim should be a perfect, unedited performance - leaving even minor fluffs in actually gets distracting on repeated listening - the mistakes become obvious over time.  Live performance is far less critical!

Every Blessing

|Tony