If this is more than a mere furphy, then get ready for the inevitable round of glib speculation about the redundancy of musicians… Apparently, a pair of ubergeeks who made their millions as VoIP developers, have been squirreling away at the problem of polyphonic MIDI transcription and finally found a way of making it viable. (Polyphonic transcription is the ability to translate a piece of music with more than one note playing at one time (ie chords) into MIDI code sequences. Up till now, this has been only 80% possible, which means that 20% of the notes are lost. So it hasn’t really been viable…)
In a couple of weeks time, however, the VoIP geeks are promising to debut faithful MIDI reproductions of old recordings by two long-dead piano virtuosos. Naturally, the recordings contain plenty of polyphony, and if they can pull it off, it will be like cold fusion… that works. We await the debut with serious interest… (via Music Thing)