Yet another Pianoteq critique

Good points, delvento.

But if I may go out on a limb, is there something more important than just the ‘piano-sound’?

I mean, Glenn Gould once said he didn’t like the sound of the piano, and on the face of it this sounds counterintuitive, or just GG being GG; but I think he was making a bigger point about the fact that the process/act of playing the piano is in fact more important than the resulting sound itself; because, let’s face it, there is a sameness that simmers in after years and years of listening to ‘the piano’; however, the almost evangelical act of sitting down in front of this machine, as if for a prayer, is what truly keeps us going.

Sampling is a sin!

It’s me, again, but I felt it necessary to make a clarification for those who are not very clear about Pete!

Yes, I ended my previous post with a little peteism (an attempt at a joke), and whilst I’m certain that some ‘get’ this, others might not; so, yes, the GG statement is very real (look it up, if you will), and yes, I truly believe we do obsess too much over what ‘sounds like a piano’, and not enough over other more-nuanced aspects of playing the piano. The line, ‘as if for a prayer’ is meant to be poetic, but if some find it absurd, that’s also fine.

There’s a difference between living in ‘The Matrix’ completely oblivious of the fact, and/or simply tapping into it occasionally; because the ‘real’ world can be so much more absurd.

BTW, is this place still catering to going off-topic?

EssBrace Completely agree

Pete14 There’s a difference between living in ‘The Matrix’ completely oblivious of the fact, and/or simply tapping into it occasionally; because the ‘real’ world can be so much more absurd.

The point is not here… I prefer to « go in the Matrix » and play without disturbing my family with half finished pieces of music, it would be a casus belly ! (My choice of a N1X was « as close as possible to the real thing without disturbing my family »). Then the question is not in or out the Matrix, but between a realistic Matrix, and a vectorised approximation of the Matrix. Nowadays, only sampled based virtual pianos are the most accurate. Perhaps modelled piano will be better if I wait for a time. But Pianoteq and Roland didn’t convinced me.

I really wonder why there is so much discussion on this kind of matters. Piano playing for us, amateurs, in mostly for our own pleasure. So, if someone enjoys Pianoteq better than, let's say, VSL Synchron Pianos, or it is the other way… why should anyone else discuss that and say absolutely things, as if there is only one truth?

My 10 months old grandson enjoys his toy piano (*) better than my acoustic upright. Should I forbid him to enjoy his piano, as it is just a lofi sampled piano sound, zero pivot length and has no sustain?

I know sometimes discussion here is just for the joy of it, but I get tired of this ping-pong threads.

Yes, I can just ignore them and keep playing what I enjoy, I know…

Jose

(*) A gift from his grandfather 😃

I was just trying to stress that 1980s samples and 2020s samples pianos are a bit different : we can’t underestimate the difference.

It is the same with modelling : in 1980s, we had roughly FM, now, Pianoteq is likely (according to a Modartt patent) to use heavily a additive synthesis.

And yes, we should use what enjoy us the most, be it acoustic (if neighbourhoods constraints permit), modelled, samples…

Frédéric L Perhaps modelled piano will be better if I wait for a time. But Pianoteq and Roland didn’t convinced me.

Not ‘perhaps’; it’s a given that modelled pianos will be better in the not-so-distant future.

So, you’re not fully ‘convinced’, and I respect that; but if I may, I wasn’t very convinced by the very first iPhone, and said, “it’ll never be better than my BlackBerry”; well, the iPhone has rendered the BlackBerry obsolete (go ahead, anyone, try using your BlackBerry). Yes, the BB has been officially taken off life-support!

Samples, as delvento points out, are now modelling resonances, and this is an admission that mics can’t capture the elusive and mysterious resonance(s) the way modelling does.

I’m not saying we take samples off life-support now, but pretty soon the burden will be burdensome, expensive, and not worth the effort; and, like the BB, samples will be humanely put to sleep.

Now, Mac says we’re decades away from the future; I say we’re no more than a few years away, so, go ahead, place your bets!

Judging by the very slow progress of Pianoteq from version 1 up to now, I’d make a wild guess that purely in terms of timbre richness, Pianoteq will need 50-100 years to be able to reach the realism of the most recent sampled libraries. Of course that may not be needed at all. Pianoteq has an enormous fan base, so they don’t have to bother to make the final 10% to the target by spending 100 years. So, it’s just a theoretical arguments we have here after all 😀

P.S. to make a cross-reference to another flame topic here, Covid, I think in the same way people lost their freedom for the last two years and seemingly accept all the “new normal”, maybe what a real acoustic piano sound is would become irrelevant in a few more years and people would be perfectly OK with having the advantages of modeled pianos when the new normal of pianos is what Pianoteq offers. I’m not being ironic. I realize I’m in a crowd made of snobbish purists who are an ever shrinking minority… 😢

So, it seems like CG is betting on Mac (not that I’m surprised). 😉

But if I may, this slow progress you talk about is real, but the ‘one-more-thing’ you’re missing is that most ‘newly emerging tech’ tends to move sequentially at first (1,2,3, etc..), but then, once the tech reaches a certain level of maturity, exponential growth takes over (4,8,16, etc..); Pianoteq is now ready to take that leap forward (literally).

If you don’t buy my ‘exponential growth’ theory, well, maybe you’ll need to bring that up with Mr. Kurzweil, for he is the brain behind this, and dare I say it, he’s been right more often than wrong!

Please continue placing your bets on ‘how near is the future, a few years or decades away’?

It’s possible for Pianoteq to make some quantum leaps if newer CPU architectures are introduced with specialized functionality to allow for much more detailed modeling and algorithms to be executed in real time.

I think the slight stagnation in Pianoteq progress so far is largely determined by a saturation point in CPU speeds. Maybe newer, neural based, processors are needed and a complete modeling algorithm overhaul is needed.

Honestly, don’t really think Pianoteq qualifies as “modeled” in the way many people imagine it. Yes, it’s “modeled” and probably much more than many other things pretending to be modeled too. But it’s not a real modeling of the moving parts and air 🙂 It’s just some clever math that synthesizes sound. It emulates many piano artifacts. But it’s not virtual recreation of materials that interact to produce sound in the way it happens in a piano. Which is also called finite element analysis. We’re probably hundreds of years from being able to model a piano in real time with finite elements. If that’s possible at all.

If I may reuse Frédéric L example. The FM-synthesis allowed for making the (in)famous DX-piano sound that basically destroyed Rhodes pianos. It didn’t sound exactly like Rhodes but nobody cared 🙂 It was kind of Rhodish and you could say it modeled a Rhodes. But it didn’t 😀 It just happened to synthesize sound that resembled Rhodes piano sound. I think to a certain degree that’s how Pianoteq works, although it’s a modern product that is specifically created to emulate/model acoustic pianos and is thus much closer to a real piano than a DX7 is to a Rhodes.

We get into semantic territory easily here. Technically, generating sound through samples is also modelling, where the model is highly complex and contains the samples for the individual notes (except some of the notes may be found via interpolation, which is truly and honestly an example of modelling).

CyberGene I think the slight stagnation in Pianoteq progress so far is largely determined by a saturation point in CPU speeds.

Yes, when PTQ came out in 2006, this problem had just started: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/27875/moores-law-and-clock-speed and many people (including PTQ developers, I reckon), thought it was a temporary blip, if they even were aware of it. On the other hand, storage was not on a path to catch up with computing. We know how it went: CPU clock speed not only stagnated, but regressed. The fastest CPU speeds were indeed reached around or shortly after PTQ came into existance (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate#Historical_milestones_and_current_records ) and then at best stayed constant, but in many case they became slower. Yes, multicore came, and a few others tricks, which mitigated the clock speed stagnation/decrease, but those are effective only for certain workloads. I am not sure what is the PTQ (computing) limiting factor, I can speculate it's the FFT, in which case multicore definitely helps and will continue to with increasing core count (which does not appear to be slowing down, even though very large core counts are not common for home computers, because they are not useful for more common home computer tasks). So PTQ in a sense painted themselves in a corner.

On the other hand, storage did catch up with computing, so arguably from this point of view samples have the advantage now (from a pure technological perspective). The only reason why they "feel" clunky is that from a commercial point of view the home computers are usually not "pushed" from a storage point of view, since most of the storage (i.e. pictures and videos of your cat) are preferred to be stored in the cloud for convenience (i.e. so you are locked with your vendor, rather than in charge of your data 🤣) -- but the technology is more readily available for the home user: you can easily buy and use a multi TB storage; whereas you can buy a 128-core CPU, but it'd be very hard if not impossible to use it on your home computer. Assuming that PTQ limiting factor is the FFT at a size which would benefit from such a CPU (like samples benefit from larger disks) and not something else yet (which will certainly become important at some point, for the Amdahl's law, and that point might be even already here, and so PTQ would not benefit from such a 128-core CPU)

CyberGene We’re probably hundreds of years from being able to model a piano in real time with finite elements. If that’s possible at all.

I think with this chip you could do it today. But I don't think you can afford to use that chip in your laptop anytime soon, and it'd probably be a long shot for using it even in your datacenter.

But the question is: would a more physical modeling sound more realistic to you and @MacMacMac ?

QuasiUnaFantasia Technically, generating sound through samples is also modelling, where the model is highly complex and contains the sample for the individual notes (except some of the notes may be found via interpolation, which is truly and honestly an example of modelling).

Agreed, besides the fact that I would call the "sampling with interpolation" a quite simple model (i.e. most of the information is in the input data and the model does very little), whereas the PTQ's way is quite complex (i.e. most of the information is in the model equation themselves, rather than in the data).

Pete14 Samples, as delvento points out, are now modelling resonances, and this is an admission that mics can’t capture the elusive and mysterious resonance(s) the way modelling does.

There are two things : the resonance of the sustain pedal : any microphone can capture them and the resonance between two strings without the pedal. Sampling a piano key per key can’t capture them because it is done key per key. Then many virtual pianos add a string resonance with either a modelled signal (some sine wave ?) or resonance samples (even there, there is a part of modelling : the law which tells a C4 and a G4 together trigger a G5 resonance at -8dB…).

Then on modern sampled virtual piano, it is not 100% sampled, but what the point : what matters is the result.

Your question ...

RIP Would a more physical modeling sound more realistic to you and @MacMacMac ?

... was answered by Frederic ...

Frédéric L what matters is the result.

Models schmodels. Samples shmamples.
I don't care if the sound is produced by monkeys banging on banyan trees. All that matters is the result.
If it sounds like a good piano then it is a good piano.

CyberGene I think the slight stagnation in Pianoteq progress so far is largely determined by a saturation point in CPU speeds.

Nowadays CPU are far more powerful than the ones 5 years ago. I would bet more money on the lack of ideas about how to enhance the product. On a sample base piano, following the progress is easy : multiply the number of layers, add resonance samples, etc. With a modelled sample with complex formulae one would have to add a second order parameter which enhance the whole : not an easy task.

CyberGene Honestly, don’t really think Pianoteq qualifies as “modeled” in the way many people imagine it.

I think we should use « algorithmic » synthesis instead of modelled. The idea of Pianoteq is to produce a sound with a bunch of mathematical formulae based on basic functions (sine, multiply…). But well anything which is not « sampled » based is named « modelled » : we have to adapt.

RIP Assuming that PTQ limiting factor is the FFT at a size

I am not sure Pianoteq is based on FFT… it would be to simple : any MP3 decoder includes a real-time FFT decoder.

The Modartt patent describes an additive synthesis with partial whose the frequency are not multiple of the FFT buffer frequency : you can’t apply (inverse) FFT in this case.

In agreement with Frédéric L, I'm fairly convinced Modartt uses physical based modelling, implying modelling the vibrations of strings and soundboard using differential equations (applied mathematics stuff). FFT does not seem at all relevant here, unless they use them for convenience to operate in the Fourier transformed space, which may or may not apply, but I suspect it doesn't.

Frédéric L I am not sure Pianoteq is based on FFT…

QuasiUnaFantasia FFT does not seem at all relevant here,

Well, we can argue whether or not FFT is "essential" or "convenience" for PTQ and we can look at their patent(s) and paper(s) for that, but in any case it's just speculation, since the software is closed source. What is definitely true is that they do use FFT transforms (and inverse), as it is clear from https://www.modartt.com/user_manual?product=pianoteq&lang=en#intellectual-property

But you guys are nitpicking on a detail. My (admittedly poorly explained) point was "the CPU improvements these days are mostly coming from increased number of cores and only a few applications can take fully advantage of that", hence PTQ can not "ride" the CPU speed increase as many applications did before 2007. Yes, PTQ can "ride" marginal increases in overall CPU performance, which are still happening, but those are marginal. On the other hand, sample-based virtual pianos can "ride" the storage speed and capacity increases which are happening at faster pace compared to CPU performance increase. And I say that with discomfort, because from a software point of view I like PTQ much better, but the hardware situation is what it is. In the end, anyway, as @MacMacMac says

MacMacMac All that matters is the result.