A techno-solution for wanna-be conductors

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First, there was Asimo and its “Impossible Dream.” The Honda-made robot managed to worm (robot?) its way in front of the Detroit Symphony a few months ago to conduct Honda’s signature tune. The British critic Tom Service credibly described the performance in the Guardian as “a grotesque parody of that most profound, social and complex of human activities: making music in an orchestra.”

But, hey, why stop there? A music informatics professor (I’m not making this up) at Indiana University has received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to create “Real-Time Planning of a Conductable Orchestra.” His aim is to make it possible for anyone to wave his, her or its arms in a grotesque parody of you-know-what, and your laptop will act like a virtual tinhorn orchestra and follow you.

And if that is just too much modern machine-made music for you, researchers at the Conservatory of Music in Salerno, Italy, have concocted a period-instrument remedy. They have produced a virtual epigonion, an ancient Greek instrument with 50 strings of which there is no surviving example. According to a report in the current issue of New Scientist, researchers fed evidence of the 2,200-year-old instrument found on vases, fragments from excavations and written descriptions into a European supercomputer network and you can hear what the computer says it was supposed to sound like at www.tinyurl.com/58fn2c.

— Mark Swed