----Advertisement---- ----Advertisement----

Formerly known as CDDB, Gracenote, with offices in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Seoul, provides businesses with embedded software that helps the public manage its data. Its genesis goes back to 1995, when founders Steve Scherf and Ti Kan sought ways to get computers to display information about their rock CD collections. Three years later, they founded CDDB. It has since been bought by the Indianapolis-based company Escient, which designs, develops and makes audio and video products that help home entertainment devices connect with the Internet.

The technology is making a world of difference to those who download classical music and opera onto their computers and MP3 players, as well as those who want to organize their music collections digitally. Along the way the software also helped expose a music plagiarist. Last month, Gracenote’s technology was thrust into the headlines as the catalyst for the unmasking of pianist Joyce Hatto’s recordings as fakes.

“It’s not that a boatload of plagiarists are out there, but the digital world is opening up a whole new range of possibilities, and this happens to be one of them,” says Harry Sumrall, Gracenote's classical music editor, who is tasked with developing the classical music display system. “When the whole digital music phenomenon began, it was a pop-based format,” he says. “The vast number of people downloading and ripping were pop fans.” But times have changed and classical music downloads are growing. Today, 12 percent of the downloads from iTunes are classical.

Gracenote, which claims to own the largest database of music information in the world, unveiled its patented standard, called the Classical Music Initiative, in January. For those who download music from iTunes or eMusic, the new standard is already visible, dropping properly formatted text-display information onto MP3s and hard drives. That technology embeds a ghostlike digital “fingerprint” on each classical music work. The consumer can neither see nor alter the process used for the new display scheme, which lets listeners search classical music tracks in exact fashion, and allows for playlisting and shuffling of music. For example, if you want your digital player to play all of Haydn’s symphonies in random order, the data will be organized in a way that will allow easy searching for them, without error.

“This is sort of like creating a Dewey Decimal System for music,” says Sumrall. The process, whose structure seems simple but proved difficult to implement, begins when an album or CD is submitted to Gracenote for conversion to the new standard.

The company encourages the public to submit classical works to its growing database, and says it is receiving about 2,500 submissions daily. Gracenote has roughly 250,000 classical recordings, albums, and CDs in its database that it is converting to the new standard, Sumrall says. Once a classical work has been converted, it will correspond to the new standard for digital posterity.

Gracenote does not charge the public for submissions of recordings for cataloging. The company organizes recordings so that the display information corresponds to the new standard and establishes a fingerprint for each recording. In turn, Gracenote adds the fingerprinted file to its growing database of recorded digital classical music information.

“This is very important, because classical music has complex data, and none of the digital services has been able to display classical music correctly,” says Junko Gardenour, business development manager with Naxos of America, the world’s largest independent classical label. To date, Naxos has converted its complete catalog of 2,500 recordings to the new standard and was one of the first to sign Gracenote's licensing agreement for the digital technology. Officials at Gracenote, a privately held company, declined to divulge licensing costs or what they make on each recording.

The company has no shortage of detractors, however. Many of those claim that the company is profiting from the work of thousands of individuals who submitted CD track information over the years. Many people submitted information under the assumption that Gracenote's technology would remain open-source software once the company was sold.

The new standard works only if you purchase the music from a digital music provider, such as iTunes, Yahoo Music Jukebox, or a record company that subscribes to the format. Gardenour says it has been an uphill battle to motivate companies such as iTunes to display classical music in the new format. “The ball is in the court of digital service providers, because they have to change the system to support the data provided by Gracenote,” she says. But she says the tide is turning, with iTunes and other digital music providers, retailers, and labels adopting the new standard, which nevertheless is still in its infancy: “I have not done any independent audit to see how accurate their technology is,” she says.

One effect the new standard might have is to increase downloading of classical music on MP3 players, especially on iPods, which is no small matter since Apple's devices account for more than 70 percent of MP3 player sales in the U.S. The standard will enhance the experience for those that are already using downloads and classical music on the iPod, says Steven Levy, technology writer for Newsweek. However, Levy is somewhat skeptical. “I don’t know that someone will say, ‘Wow, now I’ll go out and start downloading classical music.” Levy feels that iPod users who don’t customarily download classical music will not be enticed to do so because of Gracenote’s new standard.

Gracenote’s Classical Music Initiative seeks to stamp an organizational standard on almost 1,000 years of classical music, Sumrall says. He finds the notion of the digital age making its mark on centuries-old compositions appealing. “It’s ironic that what’s providing the impetus for us to create a standard is the thoroughly modern phenomenon of digital music,” says Sumrall. He has done research on the different kinds of organizational systems for the display of classical information, and — not surprisingly — to date he has found none that approaches Gracenote's standard.

“The challenge for us right now is making up for 900 years of lost time,” he says. “What exists is the work of scholars, academics, and music publishers [over] the last 1,000 years who’ve been slapping together whatever information about this music on whatever poster or manuscript, in any way they felt like it.” Inside that 1,000-year history, Sumrall believes that there is fertile ground for the unexpected to crop up. “The more organization you get, the more you start seeing anomalies and phenomena that you’re not even aware of,” he says.

One of the first anomalies proved to be the unanticipated unmasking of several recordings by Hatto. The pianist, who died in 2006, slowly earned cult status among critics in Britain and the U.S., as well as piano aficionados, by virtue of her more than 100 studio recordings. Battling cancer, Hatto stopped performing live in 1976 and devoted herself exclusively to the recording studio. Her recordings, released on the small label Concert Artists, run by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, were frequently praised for their clarity and virtuosity. And critics marveled at the prolific nature of Hatto’s output.

Even though her career spanned decades, it took only seconds for Hatto's reputation to begin unraveling. It happened when a classical music listener in New York loaded Hatto’s recording of Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes into the iTunes folder on his computer. When he did, the Gracenote software displayed the name of obscure German pianist Laszlo Simon. The fan alerted Jed Distler, a critic for the British music magazine Gramophone. The magazine's editors were intrigued and hired an audio expert, Andrew Rose with Pristine Audio, to analyze the recording by comparing Simon’s CD to Hatto’s. The recordings proved identical. Several more of Hatto’s recordings have since been outed as fakes.

Barrington-Coupe recently confessed to manipulating his wife’s recordings. He says he spliced in the work of other pianists to replace passages marred by his wife’s pained utterances due to the effects of advancing cancer. It remains to be seen whether more instances of plagiarism will surface due to the new display standard.

Undoubtedly, there is a lot of room for error, and some recordings will be difficult to categorize, says Sumrall. To prove his point, he likes to use as a crowning example the viola de gamba player and Hespèrion XXI Music Director Jordi Savall and his collection of music based on Don Quixote. “He intermingles the music with readings from Don Quixote and other medieval and Romantic texts,” says Sumrall. “Where do you put the text writer?” And with different texts written in French and Spanish that are attached to pieces of anonymous works from the early-music era, the possibilities mount for error in a standardized display. “It goes on and on,” he says.

That example may prove to be the tip of the iceberg for Gracenote and its quest to standardize the display for every recording of classical music out there. “There are so many things we can’t even envision at this point,” says Sumrall. “It’s fascinating work, but it’s also exasperating.”