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."
Re:Who would've thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blind music critics? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Well, in the case of Minoru Nojima (the "very obscure Japanese pianist,") any critics would not have been wrong in recognizing that the playing was obviously superb, even if they couldn't discern who the actual pianist was. "Nojima Plays Liszt" is a wonderful CD, with a combination of both masterful playing and excellent sound quality. Too bad Nojima is as obscure as he is to the general public -- he just hasn't recorded much. But that just makes it all the more special to me that I got to see him play in a small junior college auditorium just minutes from my house!
Something's not right here... (Score:3, Interesting)
from the newscientist article: "To identify albums it calculates a 'discid' from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online."
From the scientific analysis: "for ten of the twelve tracks on this CD." "Simon recording has been time-shrunk by 0.02%" and "Nojima time-stretched by 0.975%"
Ok, seems to me that the discid is calculated using ALL of the tracks, and yet not all of the tracks were from the same source - So how did the exact CD she ripped from get ID'd?
Also, the time-stretching should have effected the durations, and generated different IDs. For example, the track she supposedly stole from Nojima: the duration of her track was 3'33", meaning that with 0.975% time-stretching the original must have been 3'38". Assuming digital hashing is involved in creating the discid, this should be more than enough of a difference to create a substantially different id.
I'm not saying that iTunes didn't uncover the difference, and I'm not claiming she didn't fake it, but... I seriously doubt that all the information here about how discid's are calculated/obtained is 100% correct. Anyone know more info about how this works, or how iTunes could still have uncovered the fraud?
Not that I disbelieve the evidence (Score:2, Interesting)
Google Book Search Library Project (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Blind music critics? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll preface this by saying I'm a music grad student, so I'm more than a little conversant with the world of classical music, although I'm a string player, not a pianist.
One of my profs in undergrad (who was a pianist) told me once that good pianists are a dime a dozen. And they're all making recordings. The Pristine Classical website has quite a few possible/probable rip-offs listed, and in most cases they are pianists I've never heard of (of course, I wasn't familiar with Joyce Hatto either). This is not surprising because there are just so many pianists out there, too many to keep track of.
The other factor is that so many classical pieces end up having a few recordings that are the "standard". In other words, they may or may not be miles above everything else, but if you do a survey of music libraries, you'll find the same couple recordings of a given work cropping up a lot more. Of course, this is usually the big names.
The thing that gets me though is the one big name that she did rip off from, that being Ashkenazy. To the average lay-person, he's not one of the big names of piano (partly because he split his time between piano and conducting--he was very fine in both capacities), but any pianist (or music critic) would likely be familiar with him (particularly as an interpreter of Chopin).
There are also a few concertos recorded with Previn conducting the orchestra. The pianist wasn't familiar to me, but if he was playing with Previn, he was no slouch. So yes, the music critics are probably full of it. You'd think somebody would have noticed by now.
Re:this sort of abuse... (Score:2, Interesting)
National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra
http://www.stereophile.com/news/021907hatto/ [stereophile.com]
Re:live performances? (Score:5, Interesting)
Girl, you know it's
Girl, you know it's
Girl, you know it's
Girl, you know it's
Ashlee Simpson can hodown too
Re:Something's not right here... (Score:5, Interesting)
What I believe happened is that someone already figured this out and changed the artist and song titles _for that cd_ in cddb. Then this person comes along and pops in the cd and it pulls down the scandalous info and they think they're onto something....
There is no way iTunes is actually doing song fingerprinting to figure out what the songs are. I mean, maybe, but I really doubt it.
If you go read the Wikipedia article on the pianist it says that this was all figured out by a couple of groups at universities. So I think the timeline goes like this:
1. Someone thinks it is a fake.
2. University group studies it and finds it is a fake.
3. CDDB gets updated so the correct musicians names are attached to the work.
4. Person comes along and pops in a CD and "finds" a scandal...
Friedmud
Internet phenomenon (Score:5, Interesting)
Before those Hatto recordings were on the radar of the professional reviewing magazines in the UK, the entire promotion for these CDs was done on rec.music.classical recordings by the two shills and on the website of a CD retailer with a close affiliation to the record producers. People were praising the CDs into the sky and the exclusive retailer is a regular on the newsgroup, too.
This thing had SCAM written all over it, but overcoming groupthink in the presence of two shills is difficult. Godwin's law,you know.
It's hilarious to see the two shills in action: The one is a loud, foulmouthed ex-classical-music-producer from Canada and the other one an English gentleman with impeccable style, manners and a deep love for classical music. What they staged was drama on a very high level, flaming residents into the ground at the slightest hint of a suspicion as to the authenticity of the recordings. Anything from Jew to Nazi was good enough to be hurled at the detractors of the holy trinity of Hatto, Barrington-Coup and Music.
They almost murdered me when I told the group that the whole thing was a total fake, based on all the oddities that I named.
Re:Internet phenomenon (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Come on now (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/
Re:Internet phenomenon (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems that df5jt is Peter Lemkin.
A usenet flamewar with conspiracy theorists, and then the conspiracy theorists are proved right! The end of the world is nigh!