Decades ago, in the dark ages of the cassette tape, the question was: Is it live or is it Memorex?
In the future, the question might be: Is it live or is it Fauxharmonic?
The Baltimore Chamber Orchestra's next program will let audiences hear the premiere of a new work for strings performed both by live musicians and a digitally created ensemble. The wryly named Fauxharmonic Orchestra uses digital versions of musical notes to replicate conventional instruments, a technology that may have applications in the future for bringing nearly real orchestral music to out-of-the-way places.
"It's not a question of 'Can you tell the difference, and what do you like better?' We'd win that," says the BCO's music director Markand Thakar. "People like human beings better. At least we hope so."
Paul Henry Smith, the Boston-based creator and "conductor" of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, says that "the goal is not to fool anyone, but to see what sort of musical experience can emerge."
Synthesized musical sounds have been around for decades, and digital orchestras are not new. But the technology keeps advancing, and Smith, who has degrees in musicology and composition, has taken full advantage of that.
"By chance, I came across an electronic orchestra at [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]," he says. "It was nowhere near flexible enough to serve as a substitute for a real one. There was too little expressivity in the system. I saw no way around that. I thought that maybe 400 or 500 years from now it would sound like a musical instrument."
But things improved a lot sooner.
A few years ago, Smith invested $10,000 in a product called the Vienna Symphonic Library, which provides millions of digitally sampled sounds made by all the traditional instruments of an orchestra.
"I wanted to see how far I could push it," Smith says. "I wanted to put the technology into a setting where it would be used for aesthetic, not just commercial, purposes."
To do that, Smith draws upon his own musical sensibilities.
"I get the notes and rhythms into the computer," he says, "and then go through each bar of music, each phrase. It takes a lot of tweaking, listening and stepping back. I spend about 80 percent of my time on the musical part, less than 20 percent on the technical part."
Finding the A-flat violin note or D-natural viola note is just the beginning. The notes have to be connected smoothly together..
