14 DAY TRIAL // It is the dawn of the new, high-definition MIDI era. And once with it comes a whole new horizon expanding the audio restoration possibilities far beyond anything man has dreamed about some 20 years ago.
It's the Zenph Studios and audio research group, under the lead of the former pianist John Walker - they have designed and put to work a new way of understanding and playing music, developed with one fantastic goal in mind: having the piano masters' recorded works playable again, as if they came back to life. I know, it seems rather impossible and even I have had a hard time understanding what was going on; it's anything but impossible as soon the markets will offer the true music lovers a very special CD (a SACD, in fact) recorded this way. Shortly, what's going on:
Zenph Studios have finally developed a technology so strong and precise that they can now mix the sound sources recorded by great musicians some (down to 100) years ago with the MIDI tracks of the parts being played and thus re-create the whole thing in a new, hi-res MIDI file. Zenph claims that this new kind of MIDI file is the result of analyzing the most intimate aspects of the old recording: every subtle variation in velocity and slight speed modifications and even more - the ability to reproduce them. The scores are always the same - it's the hand of the genius player which makes the difference. Now, Zenph Studios can reproduce the actual movements of the hand back then and can (it already did) re-record the playback; so it's like having a long-time deceased master playing for you again.
Using these hi-res MIDI files on an Yamaha Disklavier is the only way to make them playable once more; even so, a usual MIDI cable was too small for the huge amount of data to be sent. Lucky Yamaha Disklaviers have a computer by themselves and so the data was stored of the HDD. Still, there is some long time ahead until the automation would be complete and the whole process carried out without so much human intervention... yet it looks like odds are good.
You can get a better picture of what hi-res MIDI means if you take a look at the picture at the end of this article. I'll just add the fact that the development of such new MIDI standard could mean an almost giant step forward in the music production, at least when it comes to software like Finale or Sibelius, imagined and built for scores and the likes.
Finally, I was telling you about the SACD due to hit the markets soon. It is a re-performance (Zenph trademark) of the famous Glenn Gould's 1955 performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations and it will become available from Sony BMG next month on a hybrid multichannel CD containing three versions.
Recorded on a Sonoma workstation and with the use of Ultrasone HFI700 headphones, the re-performance took place at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, last September and has also been processed in binaural and surround versions especially for this CD.
