iTunes clues rock classical music world

Classical music fans and techie musicians were agog this week over revelations of a possible fraud that was uncovered using iTunes and a musical database.

Before pianist Joyce Hatto died in 2006, she and her husband released a series of major recordings of a wide range of composers. Last week, a critic at Gramophone put one of her CDs in his computer, and noticed something odd--iTunes had identified the recording as a different album entirely. The iTunes software analyzes content on disc tracks and uses that data to tie it to Gracenote's Compact Disc Database online.

When the same thing happened with other tracks by Hatto, the critic called in musical experts and began analyzing the works. "It would take many weeks of intensive work to examine all of the Hatto recordings, but it seems clear that at least some of these great performances are identical to other performances available from other recording companies," Gramophone reported.

Blog community response:

"Interesting to see technology stick it's sleuthy nose where apparently it belongs."
--Cathode Tan

"If not for the surprise iTunes ID, this might have gone undetected for much longer. I've often seen iTunes and Gracenote make wildly inaccurate guesses when confronted with rare or custom CDs, but in this case I suppose that wild guess was forensically sound."
--The Unofficial Apple Weblog

"Although the story was originally broken by a journalist using the Gracenote database underlying iTunes (matching CD track times), computational techniques used in the Mazurkas project are providing more wide-ranging, compelling evidence. I also note that although 'plagiarism' has been thrown about in the coverage of this news item, another P-word with currently stronger negative connotations should also be considered in this case: 'piracy.'"
--mediadescri.be