Last week, my wife and I joined some friends for supper at an unpretentious cafe in a nearby town. It's the kind of place where the waitresses learn the customer's names and most people don't need to look at the menu before they order. We've eaten there numerous times, and the food was good, as usual.
But since the last time we visited the place, something new had been added: a small white electronic piano taking up a few feet of lunch-counter space, just as you came in the main door. Seated at the piano was a teenage boy, and he was playing pop tunes. I regret to say I can't remember what any of them were, but as we sat down close by, we had no trouble at all hearing what he was playing.
There was something off about his style, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The base line sounded rather mechanical, and while there was a melody there wasn't much harmony with it, if any. Still, you could recognize the tune, and while I didn't think this particular live music was much of an addition to the atmosphere, it wasn't cringingly bad, either.
Halfway through the meal, my wife, who was seated with a better view of the pianist, told me he wasn't using sheet music. There was something on his smartphone that he was using instead. I turned around to look.
On the kid's screen was a pattern of vertical dashes moving upward, and below the dashes was a small video of two hands moving around on a keyboard, playing the tune he was playing. Older readers may be familiar with the concept of a player piano. Before the days of high-quality sound recording, mechanical self-playing pianos were developed that used wide stiff-paper rolls with holes punched in them, and a device called a trackerbar read the hole patterns pneumatically as the roll unwound past the bar and the piano played in accordance with the pattern.
Here was a piano roll, in digital form. But instead of a player piano, there was a human piano player playing the part of a player piano trackerbar.
After we finished the meal, I went up to him, dropped some money in his tip jar (which was already well stocked), and asked him what was on his smartphone.
"It's a YouTube video. See, all I have to do is follow the keys. I've taught myself. It's easy."
Keeping up with the moving dots seemed like an impossible task to me, but then again, I was a little older than he was (he told me he was 16).
A little research shows that the program which produces the piano-roll patterns is a video game called Synthesia. I found a long Reddit thread in which various people chimed in on whether using Synthesia to play piano music was good, harmful, a waste of time, or what.
As is usually the case with these kinds of Internet debates, opinions are divided. Most of the commenters came down on the negative side of using Synthesia exclusively. One said, " . . . you probably won't find anyone using them if they're really good at piano, because learning from synthesia gets significantly harder the harder the songs get."
On the other hand, one enthusiast said, "I'm very pro [synthesia]. I have memorized Maple Leaf Rag, Fur Elise, and currently working on a very advanced piece. I'm an adult beginner and piano is not a huge priority in my life. I don't really want to learn to play the 'right' way. I just want to go straight to playing cool pieces."
The fact that conventional musical notation is essentially a foreign language that one has to learn came up a lot. A person who could read music and also uses Synthesia-based videos says that he picks up non-classical music with Synthesia, although he usually knows the piece already from having learned it from sheet music.
While I was secretly hoping to find some manifesto by the Piano Teachers' Guild coming out with guns blazing to condemn Synthesia, there is apparently no such document. Instead, several online commenters say it can be good for beginners, but definitely no substitute for learning to read sheet music the old-fashioned way.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that back when player pianos became available around 1900, some people taught themselves to play by watching the holes pass over the trackerbar. But the only role player pianos played in the life histories of famous musicians I'm aware of, were as ways of preserving their playing at a higher quality than old sound-recording technology could achieve. For example, George Gershwin produced a set of reproducing-piano rolls which preserve dynamics of playing as well as timing and sequence. He was even known to go over the rolls after he had recorded them to touch up mistakes and otherwise enhance his own performances.
So are the piano teachers of the world doomed by the advent of Synthesia and its spawn of YouTube videos? It doesn't look that way.
For people who either can't afford piano lessons or aren't that committed to learning, but would like to do something musical with an inexpensive keyboard and a smartphone, Synthesia seems to be a good way to fool around with the basics. In that sense, it's kind of like using a skateboard instead of walking. It's fun, it will get you some places faster, but nobody skateboards from Nashville to Chicago. And for people who simply can't imagine trying to learn to read musical notation but want to make music with a keyboard, it's a crutch that might enable you to do what you otherwise couldn't do at all.
Sources: The Reddit thread from which I excerpted comments can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/11j3u6o/i_dont_understand_how_people_learn_a_song_using/. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Synthesia.
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