arly this evening in St. Paul a panel of seven pianists will gather in the intimate Sundin Music Hall on the campus of Hamline University to judge the six young finalists in a new international piano competition. But in an unprecedented move, an eighth judge, Yefim Bronfman, with the highest profile among these pianists, will also be evaluating the finalists. From Hamamatsu, Japan. Where it will be early Friday morning.

How is this possible? Welcome to the first International Piano-e-Competition.

Mr. Bronfman, whom the contest's Web site (www.piano-e-competition.com) calls an "e-judge," is to sit in a 200-seat recital hall in the international headquarters of the Yamaha Corporation listening to the performances of the young pianists in St. Paul as reproduced onstage through a Yamaha Disklavier Pro piano, essentially a 21st-century player piano. With Yamaha as one of the sponsors of the competition, it has a blatantly promotional underlay. But beyond product placement, the contest does raise questions about the uniqueness of live performance and the appropriate uses of ever-advancing technology in music.

For this round the finalists are required to play any Schubert sonata of their choice. As Mr. Bronfman hears each disembodied performance, he will be able to watch a video relay of the actual Schubert-playing performer in St. Paul, synced exactly to the music.

Though these pianos are Yamaha concert grands that can be played like any standard piano, they are equipped with the Disklavier computer system, the most advanced of several on the market that strive to replicate a pianist's performance. (A Disklavier Pro concert grand retails for $152,995, while a standard nine-foot Yamaha sells for $25,000 to $30,000.)

These systems, their promoters and champions assert, can precisely analyze and store every nuance of touch, every pedaling effect in a pianist's performance. The stored performance, they say, can then be reproduced on the piano with the flick of a switch, or downloaded onto another Disklavier piano and reproduced with the same exactitude.

The idea for involving e-judges in the competition originated with Alexander Braginsky, 58, a professor of piano at the University of Minnesota School of Music as well as the co-founder, president and artistic director of the Piano-e-Competition, who approached Yamaha for its support.

The Moscow-born Mr. Braginsky was "raised in the most competitive musical environment ever," he said in a recent interview from Minneapolis. So he is dismayed that competitions have lost respect among large segments of the profession, he said. Though most critics would say the problem stems from the basic inappropriateness of trying to rank artistic performances, Mr. Braginsky blames the inadequate quality of the judging.

When he moved to the West, he was often asked to be a competition judge. "Everywhere I went, I met the same judges," Mr. Braginsky said.

They were typically retired pianists, pianists with modest performing schedules, former competition finalists whose careers had not fulfilled early expectations and teachers. "They traveled from one competition to another," he added.

He said he wanted to entice into the judging ranks notable concert pianists like the Russian-born Mr. Bronfman. But pianists with heavy touring schedules are often not free to judge long competitions. (This one began June 4 and concludes on Sunday.) The answer? Bring the competition to the touring pianists.

Mr. Bronfman, on tour in Korea and Japan, is scheduled to arrive in Hamamatsu late tonight from Seoul. He has agreed only to help with the final rounds during the next four days.

Mr. Bronfman's colleague and New York neighbor, the pianist Emanuel Ax, had originally agreed to join him in Japan as a second e-judge. But Mr. Ax pulled out a few months ago, he said in a recent interview, because of a scheduling conflict.

His withdrawal clearly rattled the competition's organizers. As recently as last week Mr. Ax's name was still prominently featured on the event's Web site.

When contacted this week, Mr. Ax said that it was his understanding that he had been asked to judge the finals by means of a "video feed" alone. He called the Disklavier "a fabulous gadget" and said he was considering using one to help in practicing.

Still, despite his enthusiasm for the Disklavier, Mr. Ax said that he would have found relying on one to judge a young pianist's performance "very weird." When his schedule conflict forced him to withdraw, he felt relieved in some ways, he said.

Mr. Bronfman expressed excitement over his own role. "I thought it would be kind of neat to be sitting in a little room in Japan and seeing what happened in Minnesota at the same time," he said in an interview from Seoul.

But it will not be exactly the same time. It takes roughly 30 minutes to transmit and download a performance over the Internet.

Still, though he sees "enormous possibilities" for this technology to reach wider audiences, as of Monday he had never tried out or heard a Yamaha Disklavier. "If I have any doubts about what I hear," he said, "I will not submit my remarks."

As Mr. Ax indicated, the Disklavier piano is a fabulous gadget. James Wooten, the director of the services department at Yamaha Artists Services in Chelsea, explained that the key mechanism of a grand piano is a long, thin piece of wood that functions like a seesaw. A Disklavier computer uses fiber-optic sensors to calibrate the speed, pressure and touch of the finger's impact on the exposed end of the seesaw.

A Disklavier piano is equipped with electronic solenoids that essentially lift the other end of the wooden seesaw when the stored performance is played back. Measuring pedaling effects is far more complicated. But the Yamaha engineers, who pioneered this technology in the late 1980's, have made enormous advances in recent years, though other manufacturers of pianos, both acoustic and digital, have also done work in this field.