It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig...
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With regard to the main question, I picture most people listening to the computer playing the Goldberg out of curiosity and then moving on. If it did indeed play the work like Gould, the point would escape me altogether, though they did well to constantly invoke Gould's name, for his obsession with the perfect recording suggests one performance fixed in time, which I take it is what the computer 'performance' would also be.
That brings to mind those artists -- Curzon, Serkin, et al. -- who had to be dragged to the studio, or Celibidache, who wouldn't record in a studio at all, because the idea of a fixed performance was alien to them. And so, we have fixed performances from Gould and a computer, but I think there are few of us who would not turn to Perahia, Hewitt, Tureck et al. for greatly varied performances, and the concert hall where inspiration of the moment (notable with Arrau, Cherkassky, though I'm straying from the Goldberg again here) may make for magic moments.
So, no, we don't NEED genius robots. But I was delighted that your blog was mentioned and given due credit in the discussion, Bob, and in tones of such well-deserved respect.