Pianist should be behind bars
A new use for the burgeoning MP3 software industry has been identified--detecting fakes. In a case that's rocking and rolling the classical music world, recordings by a prominent pianist, Joyce Hatto, have been found to be fakes--plagiarized from other performers' recorded works.
A British music lover loaded a Hatto CD into their computer and Apple's iTunes product did what it was supposed to do--it identified the music by passing it to Gracenote (an online music catalog), who automatically analyzed the music and determined that it was a performance of Liszt by a musician named Laszlo Simon, and not by Hatto. It does this comparing the track length and other musical externals.
The British music magazine Gramophone investigated and found out that it was true--the sound waves of the Hatto recording and the Simon recording were identical. Once researcher who examined several other Hatto pieces concluded that ""We have yet to investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax."
Wikipedia has a nice table detailing Hatto's "career" recordings juxtaposed with the likely actual performer. In some cases, someone apparently made an effort to hide the deception by slowing a little bit down or something similar.
Hatto is dead, but her husband William Barrington-Coupe, who was also her publisher, denies any wrong-doing.
Obviously he's lying.
There are millions of variables involved in musical performance and a small change in one will affect the resulting recording. Different pianos sound slightly different in different weather and different pianists have a different style which would show up, if not audibally, certainly visually in a recording.
Something similar is being done by schools with student term papers. There are also companies involved in developing picture fingerprinting to spot copyrighted materials that are being illicitly used on the web. It seems as if we're headed to a world where plagiarism is a thing of the past, where everything is recorded, everything attributed and thieves will get smoked out early in the process.
Posted on February 22, 2007
