iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax 311
holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."
live performances? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the husband, either he recorded her playing in a studio, or he didn't. I don't see how you can mistake that and claim "I dunno how this happened."
Basically he's been busted and he's lying to save his ass.
Tom
Why iTunes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on now (Score:5, Insightful)
Blind music critics? (Score:5, Insightful)
This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.
Re:Why iTunes? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes coming to down and solving a previously unsolved crime - and the townspeople congratulating the horse that drew the carriage.
Re:live performances? (Score:1, Insightful)
1. Produce fraudulent recordings
2. ????
3. Profit!
this sort of abuse... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, there must be thousands of recordings of the transcendental etudes (I have several in my cd case, alone) spanning probably 100 years or so. Classical musicians often listen to recordings of the piece they're working on to get ideas on interpretation.
Imagine if you had thousands of bands playing the same song, and using the same instrumentation - I'm willing to bet I could copy one of the renditions... change the mp3 info, and no one would notice the duplicate. It's not that amazing of a story, really. I suspect her husband told her that he would touch up her recordings to make them sound better. I doubt she wanted this, but who knows? Anyway, it sounds like a few minutes work on pro tools or some other DAW. Heck, Audacity would suffice for this sort of thing, I would imagine.
Re:Blind music critics? (Score:5, Insightful)
These are people playing the same music, there are only so many things you can do to detect fakes, and I also doubt that anyone was looking for them before now. It'd be like detecting a brightness, contrast, color adjusted, and cropped version of a photo from thousands of photos against the same scene when you had no expectation that there even was a dupe.
Re:Blind music critics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Glenn Gould is still safe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:live performances? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:live performances? (Score:2, Insightful)