Fauxharmonic Orchestra - The Robot Philharmonic

I’ve been following developments like GigaStudio (see below) for years. It was only a matter of time before a service such as this became available.

I wonder how much effort is spent tailoring each simulated performance, and whether the tailoring is captured and modeled as “training the robot conductor?”

An intelligent robot conductor gets better and better at performing unfamiliar music, as you train it to better perform specific music.

This requires modeling composers. This clip (the second part) is the result of teaching a robot conductor to better perform Beethoven. Note: the human in the video only sets the tempo and cues starts and stops. All of the difficult robot training must be done beforehand.

Digital Orchestra Concert Excerpt - The Fauxharmonic Orchestra - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

You don’t want its Beethoven training to make all its performances more Beethoven-like. You want to break down the Beethoven training as training in the Classical and Romantic styles. This way the training common to the Romantic style will improve its performance of unfamiliar Romantic music. What is unique to Beethoven, such as sudden muscular, peasant-like sections for example, blend in with the general training. Given the same music, if you don’t say Beethoven those sections aren’t quite so muscular or peasant-like.

Then you can play with scenarios like “pretend the conductor has been lied to and thinks piece X was written by composer Y in style Z.” All of these questions are moot, since I’m quite sure the process and results are heavily guarded secrets. Proprietary technology with a combination of “intelligent training” and manual labor.

Film music rates – per minute (five minute minimum)

25+ instruments:	inquire
15-25 instruments:	$400
5-14 instruments:	$200
1-4 instruments:	$100

TV spot rates (:30, :60 or :90)

25+ instruments:	inquire
15-25 instruments:	$700
5-14 instruments:	$350
1-4 instruments:	$175

Concert music rates – per measure (20 measure min.)

25+ instruments:	inquire
15-25 instruments:	$5
5-14 instruments:	$3
1-4 instruments:	$2

The prices are high, but not unreasonable for such quality. They do give estimates, which is where they may share savings when the “intelligent training” reduces the manual labor for a given piece. Conversely, if you hand them an intellectual exercise in opaque experimental notation you will no doubt pay for it.

They also have a call for scores, which they may decide to program at a future concert. They don’t say whether accepting your score for a concert gives you anything other than exposure. The “performance right” of your work is their valuable (and presumably costly) intellectual property. They do say they won’t do anything without your permission — so if you are that rarest of breeds, the symphonic composer, it doesn’t hurt to send them a copy of your symphony.

Fauxharmonic Orchestra 20090520 Beethoven Symph. no 1 mvt. 1

Today you can have excellent sampled sound driven by your music production software — and use the Fauxharmonic service to record your masterpiece with the money you earn selling that commercial jingle or karaoke pop version of whatever aria Andrea Bocelli is singing lately.

Giga is joining Garritan. We’re excited about this and proud to own some of the best sampling technologies on the planet. One of our goals is to provide the best music-making tools possible to our users, and acquiring the Giga technology helps us to achieve this…

We are evaluating how to incorporate Giga technologies in our future products. We will extensively develop the Giga technologies and take them to the next level. The Giga software product line ended in the summer of 2008, but we plan to continue the legacy of these products in new forms…

We realize that many Giga users have a great deal invested in Giga libraries. It is our hope that those who invested in Giga libraries will be able to continue to use them in our future products. Owning the Giga format puts us in the ideal position to provide native solutions for Giga files…

Garritan will continue to offer its libraries based on ARIA and the open SFZ format. For the foreseeable future, many of the real-time performance tools from Giga can fit into ARIA’s modular architecture.

Fauxharmonic Orchestra 20090520 Beethoven Symph. no 1 mvt. 1