[Hitman]

ID Fuel and New Scientist are both running a story about Zenph Studios. It's a New England startup run by a couple of dotcom millionaire geeks who helped to develop VoIP. The angle they're selling is that they've found a way to convert old, scratchy recordings (of dead piano players, mainly), into high-definition MIDI files. They trigger a Disklavier Pro piano with the MIDI file, and re-create the performance, 'bringing the dead back to life'.

So far, I'm thinking 'so what?'. But behind the PR silliness, they're claiming to have solved the old problem of polyphonic transcription which, in the past, has only been possible with a worse-than-useless 80% success rate. It's easy enough to convert a monophonic sequence of notes into MIDI, but it's been pretty much impossible to do it with chords. Apparently that's what the Zenph team (three programmers and one piano expert) have cracked.

If it's true, then it could be a breakthrough as important as the invention of sampling. Imagine a system that could automatically create a 100% accurate MIDI rendition of any piece of music. You could analyse a Jimi Hendrix guitar part, edit the notes a little, and replay it with pan-pipe samples over a new track, with the feel & vibe completely intact. Guitar synths would not longer need a hex pickup, and the piano bar would be obsolete. This is all in the future (there's no suggestion that this is a real-time system at the moment, and it only works with piano) but it's still very exciting. I just wish they'd explain how it works...

"Tom's Music Thing is brought to you by Music Thing, the London-based website about music gadgets."