Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga? The day is approaching when you should be able to find out.

Musicians’ opportunities to sell their recordings may be drying up due to cultural shifts brought on by changing technology, but other aspects of technology are creating a promising new market for music: the licensing of the musical style or personality of recording artists.

The concept goes well beyond basing the avatars in guitar-based videogames on famous performers, although the idea is similar. Using complex software, North Carolina’s Zenph Sound Innovations models the musical performances of musicians from Thelonius Monk to Rachmaninoff, based on how they played in occasionally old, scratchy recordings. Using that model, the company creates new recordings as they would be played by deceased musicians, if they were around to record with today’s equipment, to critical acclaim. And that’s just for starters.

Venture capital firm Intersouth Partners led a $10.7-million round of Series A funding in the company in November, a move that saw former Intersouth venture capital partner Kip Frey take over as the company’s CEO. He told us on Monday that Zenph has ramped up to 15 employees in preparation for new releases in its series of re-recordings.

Zenph also plans explore a variety of new markets, including licensing clear versions of muddy recordings to films and software that could eventually let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians. Picture an Eric Clapton plug-in that reinterprets your solo to sound like it was played by “Old Slowhand” himself.

Zenph’s specially designed robotic pianos take high-resolution MIDI files created by software that simulates the style of classical and jazz performers from days gone by and them into sound by literally depressing the keys using between 12 and 24 high-resolution MIDI attributes. So far, the company offers new albums by legends including Art Tatum, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Glenn Gould, and up next is jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

These robotic pianos have wowed crowds in “live” settings at Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall and on the Live from Lincoln Center show, with their note-for-note renditions of performances of the past. Zenph plans to take them on three tours later this year. Its engineers have nearly completed work on a playerless double bass, and plans to work on the saxophone model next, with the ultimate goal of creating every instrument in a typical jazz band — then guitar, and so on. However, due to the complexity of playing those instruments, Zenph plans to simulate them being played in software and reproduce the sound with speakers (updated).

Hear virtual Sergei Rachmaninoff play a composition by the real Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943):



As things stand now, Zenph’s technology looks at actual old recordings to find out how a performer played a certain song, and is not capable of figuring out how a musician would play a new part. “We hope — but we can’t demonstrate today — that after we’ve done several re-performances of a given artist, we will understand enough about that individual’s musical style to be able to suggest how that style might manifest itself in the performance of a work that the artist never actually performed,” said Frey, clarifying that today Zenph’s software only reproduces performances, it doesn’t create them.

Of course, causing a musician’s musical style to inhabit a device would require a new type of licensing deal. If Courtney Love blew her gasket when Kurt Cobain started rapping in Guitar Hero, just think how she would react to a virtual version of her ex-husband playing on albums without the proper permission.

Once Zenph secures the necessary rights to make these re-recordings through one-off licensing deals with an artist, or his or her representatives or estate, it creates a new sound-recording copyright, which won’t expire for decades. This creates the opportunity to license perfect-sounding recordings from the past for use in films and television shows. A scene featuring Thelonius Monk playing in a club, for instance, could feature newly recorded music reconstructed from a hissy live recording using Zenph’s existing technology.

Taking these pianos on tour, on the other hand, is no small feat. “The problem is moving the pianos around,” said Frey, “it’s not like you can just go grab any piano in any city.”

His long-term vision for Zenph involves solving one aspect of that problem by modeling instruments virtually, so that computers can generate music in the style of a variety of musicians all on their own, without expensive hardware. This would allow amateur musicians to play along with virtual versions of famous performers, and let fans choose which performer plays a certain part and even what mood they should be in as they play.

“It introduces a whole bunch of interesting intellectual-property issues, but eventually, you ought to be able to, in essence, cast your own band,” said Frey. “You should be able to write a piece of music and for the drum piece, have Keith Moon, and for the guitar piece, you can have Eric Clapton — that is a derivation of understanding each of those artists’ styles as a digital signature. That’s further down the road, but initially, you’re going to have the ability for artist to create music and have the listener manipulate how they want to hear it — [for example] sadder.”

Clearly, the licensing of musical personalities has the potential to create a new revenue stream for artists and their estates, but because there’s no compulsory license for this sort of thing — and there shouldn’t be, because artists or their estates should have control over what their personalities do — each deal must be negotiated individually.

But if Zenph and other companies succeed in the quest to create virtual musical personalities, the market will likely create licensing mechanisms that allow a wide range of artists and labels to license their personalities to interactive music formats, potentially resulting in wrangling over music licensing. The problem has philosophical overtones: If a machine has to license a certain performer’s style, why doesn’t a human? Licensing the style or personality of performers would open a strange can of worms, even if the intent is just to fairly compensate those involved.

“The idea of extending copyright in general I’m not much in favor of, but the idea of extending copyright to style is incredibly distasteful to me,” said Eric Singer, creator of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR. “It basically means that the entire history of music, where people have listened to other musicians and been influenced by their style is basically up for grabs. Whether a brain is doing it or a computer is doing it, how are they going to make that distinction?”

Whatever licensing is involved, it would involve a new right that falls outside of current copyright law (updated). Frey clarified, “Copyright protection is reserved solely for original works of authorship that are fixed in tangible mediums of expression, such as books or recordings. From a legal perspective, there is no way that whatever rights might be relevant to this hypothetical notion about artistic style would fit within the logical framework of copyright, and Zenph would never propose that copyright be extended in this direction.” (We should also make clear that Zenph negotiates deals with artists or their estates for each re-recording and would be required to do so in the future, so it should not be seen as subverting copyright law or hijacking artists’ performances.)

For governing the use of artists’ personalities, perhaps the “right of publicity,” which governs how a person’s likeness and persona can be used, would be the place to start. However it happens, the laws will need to catch up in the years to come, because virtual musicians are already real, and they’re only getting realer.

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Images courtesy of Zenph Sound Innovations

Homepage image courtesy Wikipedia

