The technology - which is based on high-resolution MIDI files and the technical and musical expertise of its creators - offers the promise of new high-quality recordings of historical performances, without the limitations of the original recording. Of course to pull this off successfully is easier said than done, but Zenph's well-received first album - a re-performance of pianist Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations - certainly lends some credence to the approach.
I don't own a copy of the original "Piano Starts Here" so I wasn't able to compare the new "re-performance" with the original recording and performance. However, there are in fact some very deliberate differences between the two, including a corrected playback speed (faster) on the newer version, a fixed 80-ms tape glitch, and about two minutes of additional material that was missing from the original album.
I did compare the new recording to some other Art Tatum recordings in my collection, and the performances indeed sounded like Art Tatum (although perhaps a bit more "polite sounding" than some others in my collection, which could simply be due to them being entirely different performances and/or differences in the recording or even the piano used). Certainly the quality of the new recording itself is excellent - and there's even a binaural version of the "re-performance" included on the CD as well.
Hear an example for yourself. Here's a short video (3:21) of a "re-performance" of Art Tatum playing "Tea for Two" (filmed at the 2008 International Association for Jazz Education conference):
Currently Zenph is focusing its technology on solo piano recordings, but it can be applied to other instruments. And the possibilities are endless.
Eventually this sort of technology could lead to "virtual" performers, and even new "performances" of previously unperformed material by historical artists. If nothing else, it will continue to be fascinating to watch (and listen to)!
