Synthesia: A Skateboard or a Crutch?

 

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.

Apple, Google, and the Mystery of Music

Back in the dark ages of music reproduction, when state-of-the-art was a plastic box called a cassette tape, yours truly worked for a few summers between college semesters at an audiovisual repair shop.  Most of my time there, I spent in the back room trying to fix recalcitrant tape recorders and players, but once in a while we were short-handed and I actually had to deal with a customer.  One guy I remember in particular.  He had brought in a strange-looking cassette player shaped and colored more or less like a volleyball, and its guts were not cooperating with my attempts to fix it.  One day he stopped in and demanded to see the guy who was actually working on his unit.  I came out to the front counter and tried to explain the problem to him.  He listened patiently, and then all he said was, “Man, I gotta have my music.”

Multiply him by the seven billion or so people on this planet, and you can realize some of the consequences of the fact that music is a universal feature of human culture, and the scale of money to be made by whoever provides music to these masses.  Before mechanical sound reproduction was possible, this was by necessity a retail operation.  Either you made music yourself, which is still the main way to hear music in many parts of the Global South, or you supported a few specialists called musicians, who could entertain as many people at once as could hear the sounds they made—a few thousand at a time at most.  Then came the phonograph, radio, magnetic recording, digital audio, the iPod, and most recently, according to Wired.com, Google and Apple’s attempts to dominate the global supply of streaming music to smartphones. 

Wired reporter Matt Honan admits that music is now a commodity, like gasoline or pork bellies.  The important thing about a commodity is the bulk price that  the distributors pay to the suppliers, which Apple reportedly offered to set at six cents per 100 songs streamed.  If Apple prevailed, that would mean for every song streamed to an individual listener, the entity formerly known as the record label would receive six ten-thousandths of a dollar.  Just a few years ago, when 45-RPM discs were still being sold, royalties might have amounted to as much as a tenth of the cost of a record, say maybe sixty cents.  Of course, you could listen to a record over and over again, but the same is often true of streaming audio.  The point here is that the cash return to the label for each listen has diminished almost to the vanishing point. 

It is not clear that Apple’s low bid will win out, but something close to it probably will.  And in the nature of digital distribution, we will probably end up with one major worldwide supplier of music to the masses, just as Google is the major supplier of search-engine technology.  Is this a bad thing?

It depends on what you think music is for.  Many people I know, especially younger ones, but even including my wife (who turns 57 next Tuesday), view music as a sort of background accessory to their lives, like certain styles of clothing.  The music they listen (or listened) to in their 20s and 30s becomes a part of them, and they select it to accompany or even induce certain moods of relaxation, pleasure, and so on.  For many people, like the gentleman I waited on at the repair shop, life without music is unimaginable, and it forms a continuous undertone to their lives at work and home.  If this is all that music means to you, then it doesn’t matter that much who supplies it, just as the name of your electric utility company probably doesn’t matter to you as long as the price is reasonable and the delivery is reliable.  That’s what dealers in commodities do:  deliver the goods reliably at a reasonable price.

But if you believe music is the most direct path to one’s emotions, in a manner of speaking a direct line to the soul, and can represent the abstraction called beauty, which is one of the “three roads to God” (the other two being truth and goodness)—well, then, the matter becomes a little more serious.  While it is unlikely that Google, Apple, or whoever ends up in charge will discriminate against particular styles of music if such discrimination reduces the bottom line, we can expect censorship to become an issue, especially in countries or regions where restrictive regimes hold power.  In the past, revolutionaries and freedom fighters have used music to great advantage.  In the classic World War II film Casablanca, no one can forget the stirring cafe scene in which a group of German soldiers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” are drowned out by the French patriots singing “La Marseillaise.”  Say Google becomes the music supplier of choice in China, and the government decides that anything with religious or political overtones is not allowed?  Google and Yahoo and other high-tech firms have already kowtowed to the demands of governments for censorship with regard to search-engine results, and why should songs be any different?

Fortunately, anyone with a pair of lungs and vocal cords can make some kind of music or other.  And even now, in secret house churches, in African villages, and anywhere two or more people decide to sing together, the mysterious thing called music is doing its work in putting human beings in touch with the transcendent.  And we don’t need Apple's or Google’s help with that.

Sources:  The Wired.com story “Why There Are So Many Streaming-Music Rumors Right Now” appeared on Mar. 8, 2013 at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/why-there-are-so-many-streaming-music-rumors-right-now/.  My thoughts on music drew inspiration from a talk (downloaded from iTunes!) by Peter Kreeft entitled “Beauty,” which is available at http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm.  And the name of the 19th-century patriotic song that the Germans sing in Casablanca is disclosed at http://www.vincasa.com/indexwacht.html.