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iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax

Posted by kdawson on Tue Feb 20, 2007 02:59 PM
from the man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-Hatto dept.
Music
holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."
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  • What is that? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:01PM (#18086428)
    That is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing.

  • They may be .... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ehaggis (879721) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:05PM (#18086482)
    (http://www.restorationunity.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 05 2005, @08:12AM)
    ...Hayden other recordings. I say, Bach to the source to find out what is going on! I won't be Chopin at I-Tunes anymore.

  • live performances? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis (446163) <tomstdenisNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:07PM (#18086516)
    (http://libtom.org/)
    I can see the CDs being rips, but didn't she play publicly? Be kinda hard to fake that :)

    As for the husband, either he recorded her playing in a studio, or he didn't. I don't see how you can mistake that and claim "I dunno how this happened."

    Basically he's been busted and he's lying to save his ass.

    Tom

  • Bill says (Score:2, Funny)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:08PM (#18086530)
    I guess that wasn't a Hatto(ri) Hanzo piece after all!
    • Re:Bill says by Vexler (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @07:36PM

  • Why iTunes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by govtpiggy (978532) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:08PM (#18086532)
    This isn't specific to iTunes at all. There are lots of players and applications that take advantage of CDDB. The first impression you get from the article is that Apple somehow managed to catch a fraud, while that isn't the truth at all.

    • Re:Why iTunes? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hijacked Public (999535) * on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:31PM (#18086880)
      The impression I took from the article is that there was strong suspicion that her CDs were fakes but no one could determine exactly which recordings from other artists had been used. iTunes, by way of CDDB, pointed the guy from Gramophone in the right direction.


      So no, not iTunes directly, but since it is the Windows of music management applications it was in the right place at the right time. Also recall that these are music people and we are geeks. We may know all about CDDB and music players and which bit of software performs which task, but most normals don't know or care. Even if you try to explain it to them they will stare off in the distance, blankly, wishing they were listening to a modified version of Nojima being passed off as Hatto playing Liszt.

      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Why iTunes? by jackbird (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @06:47PM
      • Re:Why iTunes? by MindStalker (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:08PM
      • 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Why iTunes? by Bob Uhl (Score:2) Wednesday February 21 2007, @12:35PM
    • Re:Why iTunes? by Anonymous Coward (Score:3) Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:23PM

      • Re:Why iTunes? (Score:5, Informative)

        by dschuetz (10924) <.slash. .at. .david.dasnet.org.> on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:33PM (#18086906)
        (http://www.dasnet.org/)
        iTunes didn't catch it, CDDB did.

        Actually, neither iTunes nor CDDB caught it. The person who put the CD in caught it, when he realized that the data CDDB/iTunes returned wasn't for the CD he'd put in, but was close enough in content that he was intrigued enough to do an a/b comparison.

        I'm betting a bunch of other people saw the same thing, and either didn't correct it, or said "huh" and just "corrected" the artist's name based on what they thought it was supposed to be, assuming the data in CDDB was wrong.

        So kudos to the guy who noticed!
        [ Parent ]

        • No, really *WHY* iTunes? (Score:4, Informative)

          by JacksBrokenCode (921041) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @07:00PM (#18089862)
          Neither the Gramophone article [gramophone.co.uk] written by the critic who noticed the oddity, nor the Pristine Classical detailed write-up [pristineclassical.com] ever mention iTunes or any other specific player.

          Several days ago, another Gramophone critic decided to listen to a Hatto Liszt CD, of the 12 Transcendental Studies. He put the disc into his computer to listen, and something awfully strange happened. His computer's player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist Lászlo Simon. Mystified, our critic checked his Hatto disc against the actual Simon recording, and to his amazement they sounded exactly the same.

          In then went a recording of Hatto playing two Rachmaninov Piano Concertos and, sure enough, his computer's CD player listed it as another - by Yefim Bronfman, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on Sony. Again, the critic compared, and again he could hear no difference.

          Gramophone then sent the Hatto and the Simon Liszt recordings to an audio expert, Pristine Audio's Andrew Rose, who scientifically checked the soundwaves of each recording. They matched. "Without a shadow of a doubt," reported Rose, "10 of the tracks on the Liszt disc are identical to those on the Simon." Of the remaining two, he now feels that he has identified a further one - which he identified as being, again "without a shadow of a doubt" from a CD entitled "Nojima Plays Liszt", a 1993 release from Reference Recordings. Furthermore, his partner - who is based elsewhere with his own equipment - agrees.

          If any independent research was done that shows the critic used iTunes then I have no problem, but New Scientist doesn't indicate that they did anything other than read the Gramophone and Pristine articles. Where the hell did they suddenly get iTunes?

          [ Parent ]
      • Re:Why iTunes? by denmarkw00t (Score:1) Tuesday February 20 2007, @09:27PM
      • Re:Why iTunes? by tm2b (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @10:31PM

    • Re:Why iTunes? (Score:5, Informative)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll (593289) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:55PM (#18088268)
      (Last Journal: Saturday September 20 2003, @01:55PM)
      as far as I remember, CDDB goes only by track lengths. Works some of the times, but is really a crapshoot (hence genre splitting to lower overlap).

      It doesn't do any real music analysis like Musicbrainz('audio checksums') or even Pandora(manualy defined audio qualities)
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Why iTunes? by Pollardito (Score:3) Tuesday February 20 2007, @08:13PM
      • Re:Why iTunes? by Indy11 (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @10:33PM
    • Re:Why iTunes? by Lockejaw (Score:1) Tuesday February 20 2007, @05:10PM
    • 4 replies beneath your current threshold.

  • Who would've thought... (Score:5, Funny)

    by danpsmith (922127) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:09PM (#18086552)
    ...that there would be a Milli Vanilli [wikipedia.org] in the classical world.

  • I'm a classical musician... (Score:2)

    by rivaldufus (634820) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:10PM (#18086566)
    and I've never heard of her... but then again, there are a ton of pianists out there.

    Sounds like her husband was no stranger to Pro Tools...

    No matter how well known a classical musician is, there will not be 1/40th the amount of recording sales that your average pop "artist" generates on a given album. Remember Milli Vanilli?

  • O RLY (Score:1)

    by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:11PM (#18086592)

    As yet, all the Hatto recordings they've looked at have been copies. Hatto's husband, who produced and released them, says he cannot explain the similarities.
    I'd say he's got a pretty limited imagination. It's pretty obvious where the "similarities" came from.

  • How convenient! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:14PM (#18086632)
    (http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
    I love when things like this come out after the guilty party has passed on. Holding up a scam with your very last breath takes dedication, and the mental image of Ms Hatto laughing pleasantly and flipping sweary fingwer gestures from the great beyond comforts me immensely.

  • Come on now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bullfish (858648) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:18PM (#18086676)
    Stealing from the dead is a very old tradition. As is having them cast votes, collect pensions et al... No respect for the old ways anymore...
    • Re:Come on now by iabervon (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:59PM
      • Re:Come on now by feitingen (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @07:44PM
        • Re:Come on now by Bullfish (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @09:48PM

  • Blind music critics? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pherthyl (445706) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:22PM (#18086746)
    So if her recordings were so masterful, and they were identical to other recordings, then why didn't the critics recognize the similarity for so long?

    This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.
    • Re:Blind music critics? by HoldenCaulfield (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:31PM

    • Re:Blind music critics? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nahdude812 (88157) * on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:34PM (#18086942)
      (http://lotgd.sourceforge.net/)
      According to the article it's because they made subtle variations to the pieces, including changing the tempo by less than 1% (so they wouldn't sync up), changing the balance (so the center was different), and changing the equalizer (so it sounded like a different piano).

      These are people playing the same music, there are only so many things you can do to detect fakes, and I also doubt that anyone was looking for them before now. It'd be like detecting a brightness, contrast, color adjusted, and cropped version of a photo from thousands of photos against the same scene when you had no expectation that there even was a dupe.
      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Blind music critics? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ff123 (514860) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:38PM (#18087010)
      (http://ff123.net/)
      So if her recordings were so masterful, and they were identical to other recordings, then why didn't the critics recognize the similarity for so long?

      This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.

      Well, in the case of Minoru Nojima (the "very obscure Japanese pianist,") any critics would not have been wrong in recognizing that the playing was obviously superb, even if they couldn't discern who the actual pianist was. "Nojima Plays Liszt" is a wonderful CD, with a combination of both masterful playing and excellent sound quality. Too bad Nojima is as obscure as he is to the general public -- he just hasn't recorded much. But that just makes it all the more special to me that I got to see him play in a small junior college auditorium just minutes from my house!
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Blind music critics? by superpenguin (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:10PM
    • They *are* full of shit by porky_pig_jr (Score:2) Wednesday February 21 2007, @01:33AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Metamusic (Score:5, Funny)

    by mattpointblank (936343) <mattpointblank@ g m a i l .com> on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:24PM (#18086768)
    (http://www.scenepointblank.com/)
    "iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax"

    It's become self-aware!!
    • Re:Metamusic by Single GNU Theory (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:20PM
    • Re:Metamusic by C0rinthian (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:25PM
    • Re:Metamusic by Cleeq (Score:1) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:31PM
      • Re:Metamusic by ak3ldama (Score:1) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:35PM
    • Re:Metamusic by ab0mb88 (Score:1) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:32PM
    • Re:Metamusic by The Archon V2.0 (Score:1) Wednesday February 21 2007, @01:49AM

  • The husband should just call it fan fiction... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:26PM (#18086796)
    Frankly, I blame the RIAA for going after her remixes. Talk about a vendetta. A proper Slashdot comment would rattle on about how these poor folks are suing a dead woman.

    Really, the two of them were the biggest fans of the artists whose work they fair-used. They did this as an homage. Yeah. That's the ticket.

  • this sort of abuse... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rivaldufus (634820) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:30PM (#18086872)
    is simplified by the fact that it's solo piano. Unlike solo string works, intonation is not a distinguishing characteristic for solo piano. And anyway, the musical content is the same for the pieces.

    Also, there must be thousands of recordings of the transcendental etudes (I have several in my cd case, alone) spanning probably 100 years or so. Classical musicians often listen to recordings of the piece they're working on to get ideas on interpretation.

    Imagine if you had thousands of bands playing the same song, and using the same instrumentation - I'm willing to bet I could copy one of the renditions... change the mp3 info, and no one would notice the duplicate. It's not that amazing of a story, really. I suspect her husband told her that he would touch up her recordings to make them sound better. I doubt she wanted this, but who knows? Anyway, it sounds like a few minutes work on pro tools or some other DAW. Heck, Audacity would suffice for this sort of thing, I would imagine.

  • Where have I seen this before? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:34PM (#18086922)
    This should have been the quote from her husband:

    "It makes me laugh," he said. "The part I don't understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don't know him from a can of paint. I'm 15 years deep. That's how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, 'You can't be serious.' "

  • OT (Score:2)

    by Control Group (105494) * on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:36PM (#18086962)
    (http://www.livejournal.com/users/control_group)
    Best "dept." ever.

    Also, the story is pretty funny.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Something's not right here... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:45PM (#18087118)
    Posting anonymously because I already moderated before I thought about this some more:

    from the newscientist article: "To identify albums it calculates a 'discid' from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online."

    From the scientific analysis: "for ten of the twelve tracks on this CD." "Simon recording has been time-shrunk by 0.02%" and "Nojima time-stretched by 0.975%"

    Ok, seems to me that the discid is calculated using ALL of the tracks, and yet not all of the tracks were from the same source - So how did the exact CD she ripped from get ID'd?

    Also, the time-stretching should have effected the durations, and generated different IDs. For example, the track she supposedly stole from Nojima: the duration of her track was 3'33", meaning that with 0.975% time-stretching the original must have been 3'38". Assuming digital hashing is involved in creating the discid, this should be more than enough of a difference to create a substantially different id.

    I'm not saying that iTunes didn't uncover the difference, and I'm not claiming she didn't fake it, but... I seriously doubt that all the information here about how discid's are calculated/obtained is 100% correct. Anyone know more info about how this works, or how iTunes could still have uncovered the fraud?

    • Re:Something's not right here... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by friedmud (512466) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:40PM (#18088052)
      (http://www.gameupdates.org/)
      I completely agree.

      What I believe happened is that someone already figured this out and changed the artist and song titles _for that cd_ in cddb. Then this person comes along and pops in the cd and it pulls down the scandalous info and they think they're onto something....

      There is no way iTunes is actually doing song fingerprinting to figure out what the songs are. I mean, maybe, but I really doubt it.

      If you go read the Wikipedia article on the pianist it says that this was all figured out by a couple of groups at universities. So I think the timeline goes like this:

      1. Someone thinks it is a fake.
      2. University group studies it and finds it is a fake.
      3. CDDB gets updated so the correct musicians names are attached to the work.
      4. Person comes along and pops in a CD and "finds" a scandal...

      Friedmud
      [ Parent ]
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • She's in trouble now, the RIAA are after her (Score:5, Funny)

    by gurps_npc (621217) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:46PM (#18087138)
    As she appears to have copied and sold music without the proper licenses, the RIAA will be hunting here down. Merely being Dead will not stop the RIAA from making your existence a living hell.

  • Not that I disbelieve the evidence (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alissy (1040728) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:48PM (#18087148)
    (http://people.bu.edu/rgerber/index.html)
    but I would have liked to see waveforms of a third performer playing the same piece, just to see what the natural range of variation in classical music is.
    • They do by A nonymous Coward (Score:2) Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:44PM

  • I think you mean a *music* hoax (Score:1)

    by cgrayson (22160) * on Tuesday February 20 2007, @03:58PM (#18087312)
    (http://faroutshirts.com/)
    Careful with your adjectives there - it's a hoax about music, so it's a "music hoax". The hoax itself doesn't have a melody or harmony, lyrics or refrains. I.e., it's not "musical".

    And if it were, it wouldn't have really been performed by Joyce Hatto. ;-)

  • Google Book Search Library Project (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sectionboy (930605) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:00PM (#18087344)
    I am wandering how many "stolen" novels/poems/essays will be uncovered once the Google Library is completed, and who will appear on the blacklist...

  • Free CDDB (Score:5, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:03PM (#18087380)
    (http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
    The CDDB was coded as a free repository of CD metadata. Collected by thousands of people around the Net on a worldwide, ongoing basis, by giving away the client SW which many programmers embedded into PC/Mac music players. So millions of people were prompted every time they put in an unknown CD to spend a few seconds typing in artist and song names. In exchange (though no input was required), they got most of their CDs labeled without any effort, after the CDDB was filled.

    This kind of read/write database population collaboration is now well known, both in blogs and in more sophisticated databases like Wikipedia. But in the late 1990s it was revolutionary.

    Then the CDDB server owners sold out to Gracenote. Gracenote required a login to access the data, which login they supplied only to licensed users. Gracenote first tried to sell CD players integrated with the CDDB, but then found more success in licensing access to iTunes and other online music distributors.

    But neither Gracenote nor the CDDB programmers had produced the profitable data. The people who had were locked out. So some new programmers made a new version with the identical API and DB structure, the FreeDB [freedb.org], then datamined the CDDB to populate it. The FreeDB and its contents are GPL, so they cannot be "taken proprietary" (stolen) again. The data is free again, as is the life of this pioneering colalborative project.

    If you are generating music metadata, consider submitting it to the FreeDB [freedb.org]. And try to use the FreeDB, rather than the privateer CDDB, to support you applications. And send money to the FreeDB operators whenever you can, especially if you use it.

  • Glenn Gould is still safe (Score:3, Insightful)

    by joe_n_bloe (244407) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:14PM (#18087564)
    (http://www.5sigma.com/joseph)
    Not much chance getting away with calling a Glenn Gould recording your own.

  • BBC radio4 has a streaming interview (Score:2, Informative)

    by RandomWordGenerator (813207) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:16PM (#18087608)
    Streaming interview : Mark Lawson interviews a journalist from Gramaphone magazine (one of Joyce Hatto's champions) and talks about the issue in general, with semi-amusing lack of tech-spertise. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/radio4/aod .shtml?radio4/frontrow_mon# [bbc.co.uk]

  • Collisions happen (Score:2)

    by fishbowl (7759) <jmcgill@@@email...arizona...edu> on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:18PM (#18087666)
    I have, twice, seen CD's of entirely my own work, match the checksums of others when queried via CDDB.

  • How CDDB works (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:19PM (#18087688)
    The CDDB and Free-db catalogs work by comparing the length of each song. If your CD has two tracks, the first 36:24 and the second 36:42, it looks for a record with two tracks, the first being 36:24 and the second 36:42*.

    This is readily apparent when you have a CD with only one track. I go to Mike's to sample albums, and since EAC doesn't like his burner, I'll burn the whole album as a single track on the software that came with his Dell and work on it at home. Very often CDDB (or rather, the "open source" version free-db which is what all good nerds should use) will tag (say) a copy of Lynard Skynard's Second Helping as a speech by some politician.

    My turntable is a teensy bit off; my ripped copy Pink Floyd's The Wall is about twenty seconds longer than what it says on the album cover. I almost never get an accurate free-db match with a CD sampled from an LP, but quite frequently get a match (or often a series of "possible matches" that are all the same album) with one made from cassette.

    *: Those of you who are both Douglas Adams and Playboy Magazine fans will figure out why I chose those lengths for the fictitious CD

  • Oh, I thought... (Score:1)

    by hack slash (1064002) on Tuesday February 20 2007, @04:30PM (#18087868)