February 28, 2007. Copyright 2007, Graphic News. All rights reserved

The sound waves that sent shock waves through the world of classical music
By Mark Rutter
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LONDON, February 28, Graphic News: The story of how the world of classical music was duped into thinking the pianist Joyce Hatto had recorded an astounding range of works from many great composers has slowly unravelled over the past few weeks. Ironically, the technology that made the hoax possible in the first place, eventually led to its uncovering.
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When she died in 2006, Joyce Hatto was widely acclaimed as one of the finest classical pianists Britain had ever produced. Her catalogue comprised of 110 discs covering the complete solo works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, nearly all of Chopin, and the complete concertos of Brahms and Rachmaninov. Hatto had begun to enjoy growing critical acclaim in the last few years, due largely to recordings she made in the 1990s, when suffering from cancer and at an age when most pianists tend to live on past glories.
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But doubts over the authenticity of these recordings began to arise when a reader of Gramophone Magazine noticed that his iTunes CD player recognised discs purporting to be Hatto as completely different artists. As most music CDs do not contain any information on artists or song titles, the iTunes software, introduced by Apple in 2001, uses the Compact Disc Database (CDDB) system of technology company Gracenote to ascertain this. With around a million daily users in over 200 countries, GracenoteÕs system is the choice of most media players, although there are other commercial and free alternatives available. CDDB works by reading metadata -- digital information not coding for the music itself but associated with it, such as the length and number of tracks on a disc. The music is identified after comparing the metadata pattern with an Internet database containing information about more than 55 million tracks and 4 million CDs. Originally, CDDB was created exclusively from information provided voluntarily by users, giving scope for multiple errors. Now, the company also enters its own information from additional sources like other databases and record companies, as well as correcting and editing existing entries to improve its accuracy.
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Suspecting a scam, Gramophone Magazine employed Pristine Audio, a digital audio restoration company, to carry out a detailed analysis of the sound wave signatures of several of HattoÕs discs. The tests showed that all of the tracks examined were either identical to recordings of other artists or had been digitally manipulated by stretching or shrinking the time, thereby changing the tone.
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Initially claiming to be puzzled by the findings, HattoÕs husband and record producer, William Barrington-Coupe, has now confessed to the hoax, maintaining that his wife knew nothing of the fraud. He says that when he started to record her work on to CD he realised that he could cover her imperfections, which had grown worse through her illness, by inserting small passages of other pianistsÕ works. This progressed to including longer sections, and eventually to manipulating them to disguise their origin, little suspecting that the digital technology allowing him to do this would be his undoing.
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