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PARIS: Music lovers in North Carolina are due for a strange treat next month.
They will hear two piano virtuosi in concert... but both musicians are long dead.
The music will be played on a grand piano that has been specially programmed to give a note-perfect, live rendition of ancient recordings made by Alfred Cortot in 1928 and Glenn Gould in 1962.
“The piano will replicate every note struck, down to the velocity of the hammer and position of the key when it was played,” the British weekly magazine New Scientist reports in next Saturday’s issue.
The key to the phantom concert lies in the transcription of the scratchy recordings into a high-resolution version of MIDI, the standard format for encoding music for computers.
A concert will be held in Raleigh next month in which Corto — dead since 1962 — will “play” a Chopin prelude, while Gould, in his grave since 1982, will “perform” Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’.
By faithfully transcribing the notes and reproducing them exactly as they were played at the time, the technique could haul out of the archives innumerable sound recordings that have never been released because of flaws such as background noise.
Zenph’s next project is to clean up a recording made at a private party by by the jazz giant Art Tatum two years before his death in 1956, the report says. —AFP
LTTE accused of disrupting aid
By Our Correspondent
COLOMBO: Three days after the visit of Norwegian peace envoy Eric Solheim to kick-start the stalled Joint Mechanism, an agreement between the LTTE and the government for distributing humanitarian aid to the north east, the government military says that the LTTE is firing at military camps in the east.
Tamil Tiger cadres continued firing over the roadblock of the Security Forces at Mahindapura in eastern Trincomalee for the fourth day, military spokesman Daya Ratnayake claimed
“The LTTE is trying to provoke the army to retaliate,” he claimed.
He said the LTTE fired over the roadblock on April 8, 13 and 15. However, there were no casualties since as bullets had gone over the roadblock.
Slimy tribute to Bush, Cheney
PARIS: Insect experts are at odds over plans to name three newly-discovered species of slime-mould beetle after US President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld.
The guardians of animal nomenclature fear the slimy monikers may be a godsend for satirists, New Scientist reports.
The names Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi have been proposed by a pair of insect experts.
One of the discoverers, Quentin Wheeler, the keeper and head of entomology at London’s Natural History Museum acknowledged that the homage could be misinterpreted.
“There is a danger of that, but it wasn’t my intention,” he told New Scientist, adding that he had already named a beetle species after his wife.—AFP
Terror suspect
LONDON: A British terrorism suspect jailed while fighting extradition to the United States will stand for parliament in next month’s British election from his prison cell, the political party backing him said on Wednesday.
Computer expert Babar Ahmad, 30, has been indicted in the United States for running a Web site that raised funds for Muslim militants in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
—Reuters
