LONG- BUT HOPEFULLY INTERESTING- STUDY DONE ON HS TEOH'S THREAD FOR FUGUE IN G, WHERE OPINIONS LEANED TOWARDS THE POLINA RECORDING
(I would have posted this in the original thread for consistency, however, it seems you cannot attach images in replies to threads- only when creating them.)
Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to become a bit obsessed with the phenomena in that thread.
Firstly, I want to make it clear that my intention is not to prove anyone "wrong" for favoring one rendition of the piece over another. Musical preferences are subjective, and each person is entitled to their own taste. I'd like to emphasize that this isn't my composition; my personal stake in this matter is minimal, but certain aspects of the discourse surrounding Polina's version bothered and intrigued me. Through this study, I aim to raise awareness among fellow composers to be wary of situations and products like this. Blindly supporting them and acknowledging their authenticity, in my opinion, is detrimental to the very field in which we on this forum are working in.
What I hope to accomplish through the study provided below is to prove two main cases:
1. Polina's recording is a MIDI-produced rendition, lacking the authenticity of a live performance
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2. The belief, fostered prior to hearing either version, that Polina's recording was a genuine human performance led participants in this thread, consciously or subconsciously, to favor her version over ours, considering they were aware that HS Teoh and I's version was computer-generated.
I acknowledge there may be other factors influencing decisions, such as a desire to support HS Teoh's effort in recording the piece, giving a sense of confirmation to Polina's paid, hired endeavor. Additionally, some may have been put off by my statement declaring, "I am quite certain that with the MIDI data for your Fugue here, I could provide a result that is still 100% inauthentic but perhaps quite a bit more convincing." While admittedly a bit condescending, I suspect this statement may have factored into people's preferences - but please read on and consider my thoughts.
To begin, I wanted to collect an unbiased sample set without any preconceptions of either recording. I presented both versions to a music review site under the "Classical" category, allowing 20 random users interested in classical music to rate the pieces based on predefined categories (HS Teoh was duly credited for the composition, with a link to his Soundcloud channel provided) Users were asked to rate the versions on the following criteria:
⦁ Expression of performance
⦁ Quality of recording
⦁ MIDI or played by a human being?
In terms of the 'weighted average' (which considers whether ratings were above or below each person's average rating- it is not related to the 3 individual categories, but rather, the user's "overall" rating for the piece), HS Teoh+David's Version scored significantly better than Polina's version- by 69 points, or 363.16%. More than half the raters rated Polina's version below average, while on the other hand, more than half the raters rated HS Teoh+David's Version above average.
The results of the two versions in each category can be seen below;
Polina's Version -
HS Teoh+David's Version-
Observing and summarizing the comments, users did not seem entirely convinced on either version in terms of whether it was a human or MIDI. However, some users who heard and rated both versions strongly felt that the HS Teoh+David version was more likely to be a human or superior. On the Polina version, there were several comments regarding robotic playing and a MIDI feel. For the HS Teoh+David version, some users were genuinely unsure. However, many noted a lot of expression in dynamics and playing in this version, with a lack of 'robotic' comments.
Here is an AI analysis that anaylzed and compared solely the text feedback between each version: (Beneath this summary is the feedback provided by every user for each verison for you to read)
General Observations:
Version 2 (HS TEOH+David) is praised for its emotionality, dynamics, and expressiveness.
Version 2 (HS TEOH+David) is perceived as having a more realistic human touch, but there is some uncertainty.
Version 1 (Polina) is acknowledged for its technical proficiency but criticized for sounding too mechanical and MIDI-like.
Sound quality and mix are concerns for Version 1 (Polina).
Conclusion:
Based on the feedback, it seems that Version 2 (HS TEOH+David) is generally praised for its expressiveness, dynamics, and authenticity, with some listeners leaning towards it being a human performance. On the other hand, Version 1 (Polina) receives positive comments on technique but faces criticism for sounding robotic or MIDI-like, with a mention of a poor mix.
Therefore, based on the provided comments, Version 2 is perceived as superior by the audience for its authenticity, expressiveness, and overall musicality.
(You can click each image below to enlarge and enhance for reading clarity)
While the previous feedback was valuable, I sought the perspectives of individuals with expertise in music production, particularly those experienced in MIDI and virtual instruments. Using the same 'blind taste test' approach, without any preconceptions indicated, I started a thread on a prominent website catering to this demographic in the "MIDI" sub forum- and that yielded results that, though limited, once again leaned towards favoring version 2 (HS TEOH+David). Some respondents were firmly convinced that Polina's version relied on MIDI, with HS Teoh and I's version considered authentic. Others were less certain, but notably, only one comment acknowledged maybe detecting any human elements in Polina's rendition. It's crucial to note that many contributors on the site actively work with MIDI data in professional roles, yet it is important to remember this is still, to some capacity, a subjective matter. You can find a copy of that thread attached here.
And finally, in my most direct attempt to conclusively determine the authenticity of Polina's recording, I reached out to her directly on Fiverr (a website for hiring freelance musicians). I offered to cover the expenses for a recording and video of HS Teoh's fugue. Unsurprisingly, she declined, citing the "closure of the conservatory for winter due to heating issues caused by shelling". Additionally, she mentioned a "heavy workload related to concerts and sessions."
In response, I assured her that I would find a nearby studio with a piano and arrange for a videographer. However, my offer was met with stony silence, and I received no further replies despite various persuasive attempts. I had a friend reach out after a few days on an unrelated matter - he received an answer within 30 minutes.
Gearspace - Is this performance MIDI or played by a human_.pdf
Now, let's consider the logic of this entire situation: if I were a pianist who had presumably already learned and recorded a piece as technically correct as we hear it in Polina's recording, this would be an 'easy money' opportunity and a chance to showcase my talent professionally.
I would be sure most pianists, confident in their skills and aspiring to develop their careers, would likely welcome the opportunity to record in a studio and provide a performance video of a difficult, technical, and brilliant piece. Such content could significantly enhance one's online presence and attract more opportunities. The refusal to accept the offer raises questions for me personally, suggesting a potential fear that a studio recording might reveal an inability to actually play the piece. Various excuses, such as being too busy or lacking access to a suitable piano, were addressed in my offer.
If we give her the benefit of the doubt regarding her busy schedule, it still doesn't align logically. Assuming she presumably learned and played the piece rather recently, it would only take a couple of hours to go into the studio, record it, and be done with it. The piece is short (less than 3 minutes) and even in only an hour session, many takes could be had.
Let's also consider the turnaround time and overall logic of the services Polina offers on Fiverr. A 'Premium Recording,' which includes up to 300 seconds of music recorded with four revisions within a 5-day delivery time, is priced at $40. While I don't know the specific details on the arrangement made with HS Teoh before the recording (perhaps she charges more or prices out more difficult pieces differently) I am assuming Polina operates based on the services listed on the site; and it would seem impractical and unusual to learn a piece of this technical demand for only $40.
Why?
Well, even for an accomplished and virtuoso pianist, it would take at least 8 hours to sort out all the fingerings and decide on the interpretation — and that's only half the battle. This is a new piece. There isn't a glossary or history of scores marked up from various artists prior from which to pull. Figuring out the proper phrasing of each voice is even more challenging. If you're really good, and have played lots of fugal music, most of the material presented might not be quite as challenging- but when coupled with learning the piece and bringing it up to tempo, it doesn't make sense to work at such a rate,which would be an incredibly low rate per hour given the time required to learn this piece. While it's not the most technically demanding fugue, it is tough. An advanced pianist may be able to make substantial progress in a short period, but to me it seems producing a clear and very coherent recording in just 5 days is still an ambitious goal. Now, the caveat for this is the fact that I don't really know how long Polina apparently spent learning this work.
What does seem to make sense to me, however, is that one could work at this rate if they were scanning sheet music, converting it to MIDI (or perhaps she requested the MIDI data, I am not sure), and then editing the MIDI data to attempt to make it convincing using a digital piano and software. This can be done in less than 8 hours, making it financially viable compared to the time spent.
So finally, after considering all of this, let us question why all members here (except for Mike Hewer and myself) tended to side with Polina's version when, based on unbiased sample sets with less context, it seems that the HS Teoh + David version is preferable outside of this forum. It could simply just be a small sample size in terms of the members who participated in this thread. But most likely, I point to the conclusion of confirmation bias. I draw a comparison to one well-known study—the "Price-Quality Relationship in Wine," conducted by Frederic Brochet, a researcher in enology.
In one part of Brochet's study, participants were given two glasses of wine—one labeled as an expensive wine and the other as a cheap wine. However, both glasses contained the same wine. The participants consistently rated the supposedly "expensive" wine higher in terms of taste, aroma, and overall quality. The participants' perceptions were influenced by the expectation that the higher-priced wine would be of better quality.
That study, and the mini study I've done here, highlight the impact of psychological factors—in this case, the preconception of a work being performed by a human versus a computer. People's beliefs about the quality of wine can be influenced by factors beyond the actual sensory characteristics of the wine itself—so why not a musical recording?
Replies
I preferred Polina's version because I favour a softer piano sound (felted for preference) in many respects, and yours is both brighter and with too distracting a reverb. The nature of the piece to me requires intimacy, and your version feels more like a performance in a large hall than one in a small room or chamber.
It's all personal, of course, but certainly in my case there's no confluence of psychology and suggestion. I simply prefer the other sound.
Haha, this is probably partly my fault -- I did ask David for a rendering in a concert-hall type space. So it's more like comparing apples and oranges.
Oh sure, and I like reverb. All I can say is that for various reasons outside being a sheep manipulated by suggestion and perceived quality, I like the original better :)
I'm on the fence, actually. David's version has the dynamic curves I wanted, so it's closer to my original intentions. But it does have noticeable artifacts in a few places. Polina's version, possible manipulation aside, has the nice quality of bringing out the notes as they are (as opposed to how I want them to be). So I don't know, like Mike I'm torn between the two.
Maybe to settle the question I should hire someone to record a video of a real performance in a concert hall, to put all doubts to rest. Only problem is, I'm not sure if I could afford such a thing. :-D Maybe if I really save up... but then if I were to do that I'd want to record one of my longer fugues instead. Which would cost a lot more. So I dunno.
You could try contacting Erica Sipes, who has a sightreading show and played my piece Forgetting. She's taken on some incredibly complex stuff with barely a pause and seems open to almost anything. It wouldn't be in a concert hall, but it would be a real pianist recording herself in real time (and free, though I paid for her time spent writing up feedback and I'm sure she appreciates donations
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Hey Dave, that's fine, and I understand. If I recall correctly, in your previous statement, you simply indicated which version you preferred without being specific. I genuinely believe some people will prefer the Polina version over the HS Teoh+David version for reasons specifically as you stated. The sound of the piano itself is purely a subjective matter, while hearing the 'nuances and expressions of a human performance' is another topic entirely.
As I initially stated, I'm not necessarily out to prove anyone 'wrong' for liking one version or another. Instead, I aim to make a point about how certain psychological factors might play a role in bias towards one version or another, alongside an attempt to strongly suggest that Polina's version might be MIDI produced as well. I am not sure anyone can assuredly declare they are above the confluence of psychology and suggestion to some capacity (myself included),as some of that operates on a subconcious level, but that may go above and factor into larger matters than the psychological reasons we are discussing here of why an individual may prefer one musical recording over another.
I don't dispute the presence of psychological factors and bias - I once left a book of softcore porn in an empty gallery space in the tate and watched people suddenly perceive it as art, it was amazing - I just dispute that in this case my taste has been influenced by anything other than the end result of each sample.
You seem quite dead set on this issue. ;-)
Now, since you have gone to such lengths to prove your point, let me provide some, shall we say, counterpoint? :-P Not that I'm siding with Polina or anything, but I wanted to provide more information so that we have a more complete picture.
When I contacted Polina with the score, she immediately asked for (1) how quickly I needed the recording to be done, (2) how long the piece lasts (probably to determine the tempo -- the first version of the score I gave her did not have any tempo markings), and (3) whether there was a midi rendering so that she could listen to it. I did not give her the midi file, only an .mp3 of my midi rendering (the original, mechanical one that I made from my notation software), stating specifically that I was looking for a less mechanical rendering. She then requested for more time for the order, citing the difficulty of the piece, saying that it would take 8-10 days, and quoted the price of $35 (USD).
Now, the price did seem unusually low for a piece of this difficulty, so I thought about it and did a quick calculation: using Google, I learned that $35 USD is equivalent to 1285 Ukrainian hryvnia (Ukraine is where she ostensibly lives). But how much is that really, in terms of value relative to the local cost of living? Keep in mind that the same monetary amount in one country might be considered luxurious, whereas in another country it might be considered mere pocket change. To determine this, I looked up the price of a Big Mac in the US, which is $5.15, and the price of a Big Mac in Ukraine, which is 92 hryvnia. If we make the (admittedly big) assumption that the price of a Big Mac would be catered to the local country's standard of living, and therefore proportionate across different countries to the local cost of living, then we can proceed thus: in the US, $35 will buy you 6.9 Big Macs, wheres 1285 hryvnia in Ukraine would buy you 14 Big Macs, i.e., double the value. So if we were to factor in the actual cost of living (as opposed to the currency exchange rate, which is subject to various other factors that may not reflect the actual cost of living across countries), 1285 hryvnia is closer to $70 USD than to $35 USD. Maybe still somewhat low, but not as outrageously low as it might first appear.
So I went ahead and hired her, under a custom order of $35 USD with a timeline of 8 days. She sent me the initial delivery after 7 days, and some corrections were needed -- a bunch of wrong notes. Interestingly, all of the wrong notes were off by an accidental, none were misread as a different pitch class (as opposed to what happened with a different pianist that I hired for a different piece). She made the corrections and made the final delivery the next day. Notably, the recording sounded the same as before, besides the corrected notes. From this, I draw the conclusion that she simply edited the MIDI to correct the notes, rather than record a new take.
The conclusion I drew from the fact that she asked for more time, is that she probably did take the time to learn the piece, but possibly not to the level of a live performance, but just enough to record a reasonable-sounding MIDI. Maybe at a slower tempo subsequently sped up, or stitched from excerpts of multiple takes, or edited after the fact to fix any obvious mistakes. The correction of the missed accidentals confirms that she edited the MIDI rather than re-record a new take / takes.
Interestingly enough, I did browse through some of her other orders with other customers, and one in particular caught my attention: also a fugue (haha, of course). On an initial listen, it sounded like a regular piano fugue; upon further investigation, it turned out to be written for piano with 4 hands / 2 pianos (I've seen the score). The composer said explicitly that Polina recorded the two parts separately and stitched them together. So it's clear that she does MIDI editing in her productions.
At this point, one could assert that Polina could very well have just scanned the score into MIDI and edited it from there. I have my doubts about this, mainly because if that was what she's doing, why would she have asked for more time? She could easily have sent me the standard package and give off an impression of superior skill. Furthermore, if she would take the trouble to edit a purely MIDI-based rendering to sound at least somewhat natural, why not go all the way and do what David did -- add the maximal amount of expression and produce an extremely convincing result, which would further cement the impression of superior skill. David took less than a week to produce the pretty good rendering -- free of charge. If Polina were engaged in this sort of MIDI production, why wouldn't she do better with 8 days and earning the equivalent of $70 USD? And why not use a better piano VST in the process, instead of the one she used to record my fugue, if indeed she were into MIDI productions? Higher quality work, more satisfied customers, and she could easily raise her price and earn more from the effort.
The more reasonable picture, IMO, is that she probably did take the time to learn the piece to some level of competency, maybe not enough for a live performance, but enough to produce a reasonable take which she could then edit to correct for mistakes and other glaring issues. For $35 USD, I don't think this is such a bad deal. It wasn't part of our agreement that this had to be a concert-quality recording done on an acoustic piano in a concert hall -- I'd imagine that would cost a lot more!
"You seem quite dead set on this issue. ;-)" - What gave it away?
I do want to address and speculate on some points of your reply though, which is very well thought out and considerate of all aspects, in my opinion. I think you make a great correction on considering the currency conversion, which is to be considered. I would still argue, as you indicate, that $70 would be a very low cost to learn a piece of such technical demands. A pianist would have spent a ton of time getting to that sort of level to learn a 3 voice, technical fugue in 7 days. I don't feel many would put a value on their labor such as that, but you never know. I don't want to be repetitive, as I've already indicated the time demands and unclear financial sense of actually learning the piece as well as we hear it for such a price in my prior word-dump.
"She sent me the initial delivery after 7 days, and some corrections were needed -- a bunch of wrong notes. Interestingly, all of the wrong notes were off by an accidental, none were misread as a different pitch class (as opposed to what happened with a different pianist that I hired for a different piece)."
This, to me, is most concerning and even perhaps most damning, because in my experience working with PDF scan to MIDI software, these are exactly the sort of things that happen- especially when you indicate a lot of courtesy accidentals and the music itself has a lot of accidentals. The programs can pick up and convert natural signs as sharps, or sometimes do strange things such as change courtesy accidentals into sharps, flats, etc- every program is different, but almost all of them require some correction and care, alongside proofreading, after the initial scan. I would look at the instances in your score you sent her to see where these wrong notes occurred and see if there is any sort of pattern that aligns to this theory. Additionally, she had the .mp3 file of the audio - I would think she should have noticed her recording was not accurate, or, if the score was unclear and she truly didn't know what note to play, she should have asked for clarification as has been my experience so far- most musicians will just ask about any uncertainties before going ahead and recording.
"she probably did take the time to learn the piece, but possibly not to the level of a live performance, but just enough to record a reasonable-sounding MIDI. Maybe at a slower tempo subsequently sped up, or stitched from excerpts of multiple takes, or edited after the fact to fix any obvious mistakes."
I don't deny this is not possible, however, to me the timing sounds far too tight and perfect for this really to be considered. Perhaps she did "play" certain sections, or even each voice separately at a lower tempo to achieve realistic velocity expressions, and then stitched everything together. But there would likely have been quantization (timing correction that moves notes to the nearest specified note value) afterwards, as everything feels very "snapped to the grid" in my opinion.
"Interestingly enough, I did browse through some of her other orders with other customers"
As did I, and I do feel she genuinely played some of the easier material I heard. But on anything technically demanding or that would require significant practice, I perceived exactly the same as your recording- including the fugue you mention, which I did stumble across. Bear in mind, we don't know the story of that individual learning that Polina recorded those takes separately. The individual could have just been handed a recording and questioned how Polina did it, to which it is very easy to say "I did each piano part in a separate take." Polina would obviously know the work would be impossible for one player if her education in music is accurate. But that piece also sounded very artificial to me, personally.
"At this point, one could assert that Polina could very well have just scanned the score into MIDI and edited it from there. I have my doubts about this, mainly because if that was what she's doing, why would she have asked for more time? She could easily have sent me the standard package and give off an impression of superior skill. Furthermore, if she would take the trouble to edit a purely MIDI-based rendering to sound at least somewhat natural, why not go all the way and do what David did -- add the maximal amount of expression and produce an extremely convincing result, which would further cement the impression of superior skill. David took less than a week to produce the pretty good rendering -- free of charge. If Polina were engaged in this sort of MIDI production, why wouldn't she do better with 8 days and earning the equivalent of $70 USD? And why not use a better piano VST in the process, instead of the one she used to record my fugue, if indeed she were into MIDI productions? Higher quality work, more satisfied customers, and she could easily raise her price and earn more from the effort."
There could be a multitude of reasons for this. Maybe she had other orders queued up before yours. Maybe she recognized producing a convincing result, whatever the method is she uses / used, would be a little more tedious to make it sound halfway decent. She looks younger- maybe she had an active social life that week or other engagements before she could get to it. Maybe she knew the work was technically challenging and had to 'play the part,' to be convincing. I would be even more concerned if she churned the work out and handed it back to me in 5 days. As to why she didn't "go all the way," it could simply be the resources she has available. Assuming she is a student as her profile says, she probably does not have a whole lot of disposable income to invest into a better setup, so she she simply uses what she has- it could just be an old PC, Cakewalk, and an old digital piano with a few settings. Producing a higher quality mock up with a better VST requires more investment than just a good piano VST. You need a pretty decent computer to run the higher end libraries, alongside a capable DAW that you know very well as to allow you to add the nuances and expressions that mimic human performance. And then there is just a lot of experience and a learning curve needed to manipulate the data even somewhat convincingly. We are talking tempo tweaks of a 1/4 of a BPM at moments and the capability to draw in tempo bends at a microscopic level. Not every DAW can do that, and most DAWs are not terribly cheap, though some are very affordable.
I don't think what you received for $35 is a bad deal, even from my perspective of it being a MIDI mock up. I probably wouldn't create a detailed mock up like the one we did for $35 if I'm looking at it as a non-pro bono gig. The fact though that she didn't follow up and give the alternative to record it live for me at a later date, if she really is as busy as she claims, raises suspicions for me though of the highest level. Instead she chose to ignore and not address alternate solutions, which is not a smoking gun, but unusual.
I don't think this is the case here, but there is also a slim possibility this Fiverr profile is not even Polina at all. It could be some random guy with bad hardware and some MIDI software knowledge doing this as a hustle, using the real Polina as a facade. It wouldn't be too hard to find a random music student in a distant country, steal their identity in a sense, and make a profile. Fiverr does not verify the identity of its sellers.
Your insistence is paying off, I'm starting to question myself too about Polina's purported playing. :-P
The reason I pointed out the missed accidentals, and noted that the mistake was never with the pitch class, just the accidental, was actually because it pointed to a possibility of software misreading the accidental. It's hard to imagine the software would misread the pitch class -- that would be a show-stopping bug on the part of the software developers, it's highly unlikely it would ship with such a glaring flaw. But misreading an accidental is well within the realms of potential software bugs, as you say.
Now, as a counterpoint ;-) to that, though, I would note that all of the missed accidentals were cases where there was already a previous accidental in the bar and the offending note itself did not have any printed accidentals on it. So no printed accidentals were actually misread, it was just a question of whether an accidental on a previous note applied to the following note of the same class later in the bar. In at least one instance of this mistake, the wrong note was a C in the LH that Polina played as C# (the key signature is G major), and there was no sharp sign on C in that bar in the LH. However, there is a C# in the RH half a beat earlier in the same bar, followed by a C natural half a beat after the offending note. While this could well be a case of a software bug misunderstanding the intent of the notation, it seems rather unlikely -- why would the software retroactively render the C as a C# in the LH stave because of accidentals in the RH stave? More likely it was a genuine human error when playing this bar due to the abundance of accidentals on C in the RH, that unconsciously influenced the pianist to play C# in the LH.
As for why Polina didn't catch the error herself, since she did have the .mp3 I gave her of the computer rendering, there's a simple explanation: the offending notes were not in a prominent part of the texture, or in a place where a wrong note would be immediately noticeable. They were in weak beats where their only effect was a subtle shift in harmony, such that a casual listener probably wouldn't have noticed. I only noticed because I had listened to it myself so many times that the exact harmonies have been etched into my brain. And even then, some of the mistakes took effort to locate -- they were so subtle that I had to listen to the recording multiple times to detect them (the only initial indication I had was that something sounded off in that bar, but it wasn't at all obvious what the mistake was until I had a closer look).
Having said all of that, though, I did also notice that Polina's recording sounds unusually even and "clean" for a live performance. Conspicuously absent was the slight off-timing of notes that fall on the same beat, that you would get with a real pianist, because no matter how much a pianist practices to hit all notes of a chord at exactly the same moment, it's just not humanly possible to do that 100% of the time, especially in a thick contrapuntal texture. So that does raise some suspicions. Either she scanned the score, or she recorded (maybe at a slower tempo) and then quantized the notes afterwards to clean up any "messiness" on her part. I can easily imagine the latter if she was cash-strapped and desperate to earn some income, when faced with an unrealistic deadline for a technically demanding piece that she did not have adequate time to learn "properly".
As for why she would not take up your offer, which indeed does seem odd, but putting myself in her shoes: if I were a student doing online gigs as supplemental income, and suddenly out of the blue some online stranger approaches me asking to me to shoot a video of a work I performed for a different customer, I think I would feel some reluctance too. Especially when said stranger promises to pay all my expenses in renting a studio and a recording session -- which would sound too good to be true if I was not yet an accomplished pianist with many connections. In this day and age of rampant online scams promising non-existent fortunes, I'd have cold feet too. I'm not saying that this is the case, but it's another perspective of why someone may not always make decisions in the most economically-sensible way.
Now as for the fugue by the other customer that I alluded to, I think you may have looked at the wrong one. :-) The one I was referring to was explicitly scored in 4 staves, clearly not intended for a single pianist to perform. The one I think you looked at is a different one that is scored for a single piano. I did not look at it in sufficient detail to know whether it's actually performable as such, though a cursory look did not reveal anything unplayable. Having said that, though, in both cases the resulting recording sounds unusually "clean", which lends credence to your theory that the score was scanned and the MIDI edited afterwards. Another possibility is that Polina recorded a rather messy performance of it (or at a much slower tempo) and cleaned up afterwards in software (speed up to tempo, quantize, fix wrong notes, etc.). Or recorded each voice separately and stitched it together afterwards. It's possible that, as you say, she genuinely plays the simpler pieces, but resorts to other means when faced with a difficulty level beyond what her time/budget would let her achieve.
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