I have heard from many people that say that perfectly curated recordings are sterile, and robotic, which is true compared to human performances.
However, what happens if you program the the micro-inflections, agogics micro rubatos, human imperfections into a perfectly curated recording, containing interpretive aspects like pulling back slightly when moving into an unexpected chord or distant modulation, Giving a tiny fraction of a second of "breath" before a new phrase or theme enters, physical effort required to voicing in extreme registers.
In theory, if you can mathematically map and program every micro-inflection, balance every voice, and apply the best acoustic timbre to every note, you get what can be called The Platonist Tape, a pristine, sonic object that is rid of the robotic sterility that plagues MIDI files, as it sounds like a human playing, yet technically reflects the structural integrity, clarity, and depth of the work better than a human performance can.
We are in fact already doing that in a primitive way with studio recordings, by splicing takes together, and one can play the same passage 20 times and then select the best one to put into the recording. It seems to me those studio recordings have become artistic statements in their own, because the artist wants to render his/her own interpretive ideas as clear as possible.
In theory, we as listeners can start to create our own versions of a recording of a great artist, if we feel that a part of the artist's reading be inadequate for our tastes, such as wrong notes, not ideal sound in some places, and then we could create a version that we are the most satisfied with.
I think this calls to the question: Is music a sonic product, or is it the human act of creating it and presenting it in real time? I wonder if sonic excellence. If you want a good quality of sound, you could make a platonist performance with a mechanism like Steinway's Spirio, yet it doesn't sound like people would be accepting of it?
