Elton’s Baroque-it man

Research gives modern music an ancient twist

How might Beethoven have played, say, ‘Stairway to Heaven’? What would ‘Hey Jude’ have sounded like in the hands of Mozart? Researchers at Birmingham City University say that they may have the solution to such seemingly unanswerable questions thanks to a new system that can analyse the playing style of one musician and apply it to a song written by another – even if the two lived decades apart. The system has been developed by analysing hours of recordings of musicians for their quality of tone, note lengths, stylistic quirks etc, then developing an algorithm that calculates how those players might have performed other pieces. ‘It could be used to demonstrate how classical musicians like Mozart and Beethoven may have played contemporary pieces,’ promises the university, prompting images of Prog Baroque and Jungle Byrd but, crucially, stopping short of revealing how the playing of musicians who lived before the era of recorded sound can be analysed. Unless the researchers have a remarkable secret up their sleeves? Then we really will have a story…