Mr.Gumby wrote:
Quote:
You could argue that doing what I'm describing would actually be closer to the real thing.
The beauty of piping is in colour and nuance. The contribution of the player to the sound cannot be underestimated. Reproducing each note with a mapped sound, it seems to me, will not give you piping, it will give you a string of notes without the nuance and life a piper's way of handling the chanter bring to the music. Many of the cylinder recordings may not be material you listen to while driving the car or play in the background in your living room, there's a lot that can be gleaned from them listening carefully, how tone and colour is achieved, different fingerings, when the chanter is lifted off the knee and all that stuff that is the essence of piping. I am afraid all that will be lost in your proposed recreation if it is taken as a relatively simple operation. Bringing in even some of the tonal variation a competent piper brings to the music will see the operation go into an area that is very complex indeed.
I don't disagree with any of this, but O'Neill complains in multiple letters that recordings simply can't capture the pipes well and all the nuance is lost etc etc. So it's not as if the existing recordings preserve that nuance particularly well.
Color and nuance are of course quantifiable properties--they show up right there on the screen, so you can see where volume and timbre change as well as hear it. It's very difficult to tell a well sampled instrument from the real thing, when the process is done by someone who knows what they're doing. I've worked a lot with Logic Pro and you can control nanoseconds of sound very easily. Well, a professional can--not me.
What's missing--says O'Neill, and not just me--is the rich sound of the drones and the regulators, but also full frequency response of the chanter. Recording technology of 1915 simply could not capture much low or high end.
I think any such recording would have to be presented honestly as a recreation--like the WWI film.