SCIENCE

Researchers studied an area between Southwest Pass, La., and the Calcasieu ship channel in March and found unusually high levels of "hypoxia," the term for extremely low levels of oxygen.

"We saw no hypoxia in this area until June of last year," said Steve DiMarco, an associate professor of oceanography at Texas A&M, who led the team.

-- Rob Stein

Dead Virtuosos Virtually Live

Want to hear long-dead piano soloists perform their signature works -- live in concert?

Later this month, the Raleigh, N.C., firm Zenph Studios will present the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who died in 1982, playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations," and France's Alfred Cortot, who died in 1962, playing a Chopin prelude.

Zenph has devised software that can reproduce every note from scratchy, decades-old recordings, exactly as they were originally made -- replicating the original pedal, damper and key positions on an actual, albeit automated, piano.

"You can say, 'Well, I'll play it just like Glenn Gould,' but you can't," said Zenph President John Q. Walker. "This is about milliseconds, and your brain, through your muscular system, can't do it."

Zenph has found a way to transcribe sound waves from old recordings with computers, coding for 10 variables, including such subtleties as when the pianist picked up his fingers, and whether the key came all the way back up before it was struck again. The technology was described last week in the magazine New Scientist.

Walker said scratchiness "is irrelevant," because the Zenph software ignores it. Gould's Bach performance is from a famous monaural LP recording made in 1955. Cortot's prelude is from 78 rpm records made in 1926.

"None of this would have been possible without the piano," Walker said. The Yamaha Disklavier Pro is built with sensors and motors allowing it to reproduce whatever is played on it, and Zenph wrote the software to make it play the old recordings.

"When we heard how good it was," Walker said, "we wondered what it would take to hear Gould play again live, except for the fact that he's dead."

-- Guy Gugliotta