"One of the most difficult things is a line that crescendos and decrescendos," Smith says. "That energy isn't in those sampled notes. I have to add that. If I'm looking for a cello sound, maybe you can find three, four or six seconds of a cello making a crescendo on a note. But what if you need 3.5 seconds?"
There's a practical reason for all of this effort. "My day job is to produce recordings for composers," Smith says. "It can be difficult to get the attention of a conductor by just sending a score to them."
Composers of means can hire musicians to make a demo recording of a new piece. Others use MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a computer process for generating synthesized sounds.
"When you hear a MIDI realization, you cringe," Thakar says. "What Paul is doing is generations beyond that technology. The degree to which it approximates acoustic instruments is startling."
Matthew Qualye's nine-minute Gridley Paige Road for string ensemble will be premiered at the BCO concert (the rest of the program, which will be performed twice in the Baltimore area and once in Brooklyn, N.Y., is all natural, with works by Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner and Jonathan Leshnoff). Quayle finds the prospect of hearing his music Fauxharmonicized enticing.
"I know composers who have given up writing orchestral pieces because it's so difficult to get performances today," he says. "It could be that this technology will give them more incentive. Having this to send to orchestras could be useful in getting actual performances."
The composer credits Smith's involvement with making this product substantially different from anything like a MIDI version.
"In this case, there's a knowledgeable person overseeing the technology," Quayle says. "I have instructions in my score about particular interpretive ideas that are important to me. I'm looking forward to how [Smith and Thakar] decide to follow them."
Smith says he has "taken what Matthew has written and put sounds together so it sounds like an orchestra playing it."
Other applications of the Fauxharmonic technology involve instrumental and vocal soloists who have engaged Smith so they can have an "orchestra" to perform with. (For a Fauxharmonic recording of a work requiring 15 musicians to 25 musicians, for example, the charge is $10 per measure.)
Smith envisions taking digital versions of Beethoven symphonies into places where orchestras do not, for financial or logistical reasons, perform.
