Sympho Canvas, the Orchestra with No Humans

Automatic instruments and musical gadgets have been the delight of so many generations, whether we're talking about musical boxes, mechanical pianos or any other similar piece of engineering. Yet, the latest contraption coming from the Japanese company Lead Sound seems a bit over the edge, as we're dealing with a full symphonic orchestra containing absolutely no human presence; and no, there are no robots playing the instruments, but something more intriguing – no instruments at all.

The Sympho Canvas, as the guys at Lead Sound named their project, is an orchestra where each instrumentist has been replaced with a speaker playing the corresponding part.

Basically, the Sympho Canvas is a collection of 64 speakers, replacing the usual 64 players one would expect when "symphonic orchestra" comes in discussion. From all these, 50 speakers have been assigned to reproduce strings, brass, woodwinds and voice; additionally 6 subwoofers have been set in position for a bigger rumble. And if you thought about the reverberation that makes a common concert such a pleasant experience, note that 4 more speakers have been added to the ceiling and 4 to the walls, in an attempt to re-create said atmosphere.

We could talk about a highly-sophisticated 64-channel surround sound system and we would not be that wrong: each speaker plays a separate track and, summing them together and adding the bass and reverberation channels, the acoustic image of a real-concert begins to take shape. Now, if you’re asking yourselves how Lead Sound got hold of all these tracks, the answer is simpler than you think. They didn't actually record each of the instruments separately as such a task would require a huge amount of recording studio gear and too much effort.

Lead Sound simply scored the sheets using computers. Indeed, a lot of work went in arranging and processing all the tracks so that the sonic and dynamic characteristics of each instrument were finally recognizable and close to reality. The speakers have been arranged in the room exactly like the players in a symphonic orchestra, in terms of distance and height, so that the sonic performance could have as much chances to resemble a real one as possible. And because a digitally-generated sound will never come close to a real person playing an instrument, carefully-calculated reverberations were added, to supply for the lack of natural feeling.

Finally, Beethoven's Symphony No.5 in C Minor took 8 months to be created and prepared for the Sympho Canvas so you could be waiting for quite some time until new musical parts will be prepared for this system (if ever). So far, the Sympho Canvas is an exhibit item and its future is yet uncertain; some human vocal parts have been added but still, there is a lot to be done in this direction until the digital reproductions will dare compete with the sound of actual people playing. And yes, it's quite freaky listening to music coming from a room filled with speakers and pedestals, like an atomic aftermath concerto...

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