A STRINGLESS violin is set to bring emotion and pathos to that most soulless of art forms: computerised music.
Electronic musicians like to play their instruments into a computer using a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) system, which lets them record the notes and how loud they are played. Once that data has been recorded on a hard drive, it can be played back through any MIDI compatible electronic instrument.
Sounds good. Except it doesn’t. Composers agree that music created in this way often sounds dead and unemotional, because the system cannot pick up all the complex qualities that give the sampled instrument its characteristic timbre.…
