MMy memories of learning to play the piano as a child in the early 1990s may have been clouded by pride. I can still picture the piano itself. The piano itself was a very old, run-down upright with brass candlesticks. I distinctly remember my teacher, Issy, a local jazz musician. And I thought I did pretty well until my junior year…wait, my junior year? Maybe there are as many as four?
“I forgot I failed second grade!” I received a recent WhatsApp message from my mother. Her mother unearthed the marking form from a filing cabinet. So there were two of us.
The examiner's comment was so shocking that it's a wonder it didn't stick in my head. One unnamed article states that “many of the notes made serious mistakes.” In another, they were “disoriented…and the music cut out.” My scale was “confused”. General comment: “Fundamental issues must be addressed without delay.”
What if we delayed it by 30 years?
Since my failure to practice led to a family agreement that the piano was not for me, I started playing the keys again. While no teacher let me down this time, there are a dizzying variety of apps and sites that are changing the experience of millions of adults who might otherwise never have looked twice at an instrument. There is.
Pianos continue to evolve thanks to the combination of cutting-edge technology and 300-year-old technology. Amateur reality show The Piano, which returns to Channel 4 next month for a second series with Lang Lang as judge, has reinforced its status as an accessible musical instrument for all ages. And the interest that surged during lockdown shows no signs of slowing down. Last summer, Casio recorded a 133% increase in piano sales in the week after Elton John stunned Glastonbury.
My own journey back to ivory began shortly before Christmas when I purchased a piano for my 6-year-old son, Jake, so that he could begin private tutoring lessons. I settled on a digital Yamaha (the headphone option seemed prudent in my broken living space). I had no plans to perform it myself. Like my parents, I felt that piano lessons belonged to children, like yogurt bags and phonics.
All that changed when I realized that the piano came with a free trial of Flowkey. I had never heard of this or any other piano learning app that made me think that you need a real-life teacher to improve. After three months, I spent far more time at the piano than Jake. After hours of practicing the kinds of things I had previously avoided, I was able to play songs by musicians as diverse as Handel and Billie Eilish at various levels. I get carried away and sometimes have to remind myself to let Jake take his turn. I also mastered a very simple duet of “Mary's Lamb.”
Flowkey, which works on your phone or tablet, is scary smart and has sections for courses and songs. Start with the “Introduction to Piano” course to find out how much you have forgotten in 30 years. As it turned out, there was quite a difference, but I was relieved to feel at least a light sense of recognition on my fingers. Soon the saints are marching, the bells are ringing, the swans are soaring on the lake, and I'm singing songs of joy with one hand like a precocious three-year-old.
What's really clever is how the app knows what I'm playing, whether it's listening through the iPad's microphone or connecting to a digital piano via Bluetooth. So, on the right side, if you play, say, F sharp, you'll see a flashing green checkmark above the notes in the fifth line of the staff, which also automatically scrolls across the screen as you play. You can select sections to repeat with one or both hands, and playing a duff note or chord will pause scrolling so you can make corrections. A video appears above a scrolling staff that shows a real pianist in action.
I try to move on to the next course, but I quickly get impatient and immerse myself in the song. There are hundreds of songs, from “easy gems” and classics, to pop hits from Elvis to Irish, and even his K-pop, jazz, movie theme songs, and nursery rhymes (Baby Shark has more songs than anywhere else). I can confirm that playing the piano is frustrating)). Each song is presented as up to four arrangements ranging from beginner to professional level. You can start with a beginner arrangement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata before moving on to the full version. I can't imagine the pile of sheet music it would take to recreate that experience.
Jonas Gössling is one of the brains behind Berlin-based Flowkey. Flowkey started as a basic website 10 years ago. Goessling grew up playing the piano as a child in Hannover, Germany, but his skills had waned by the time he graduated with a degree in industrial design. He turned to his YouTube, which has a lot of piano tutorial videos, but “it was very frustrating,” he says. “If I made a mistake or wanted to repeat a part of the song, I always had to pause and rewind.”
It took years to perfect the interface and build relationships with music copyright holders, but advances in technology and a pandemic have combined to leave millions of us suddenly stuck at home and distracted. Flowkey took off when I was looking for a way to do it. Gosling said more than 10 million people have tried it so far, and estimates that 20% of subscribers are parents who became interested when their children started lessons.
The most played songs on this app are very middle-of-the-road songs (I mean, they're right around my town) and include the movie Amelie, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, and a lot of Coldplay music. I am. I spent years mastering Mad World, the original Gary Jules version of Tears for Fears. Lots of flats and tricky fingerings, but it quickly starts to sound good (even getting some unsolicited praise from Jake).
I mostly play it in 10-minute stints while the kids are having breakfast, during lunch breaks, or just before bed as a cultural antidote to Love Is Blind. Best of all, for her 41-year-old father, who hates poop, brevity is better. Once muscle memory kicks in after enough repetitions, there's a pleasure he hasn't felt in years as his fingers move around the keys without conscious direction.
My social media algorithm soon starts bombarding me with suggestions for other apps like Yousician, Skoove, and Pianote. The largest of these, his Simply Piano, was first developed more than a decade before him by two Tel Aviv-based brothers, Yuval and Yigal Kaminka. They were inspired by watching their nephew play tennis on an old Nintendo Wii. The app has a more computer game feel than Flowkey, but it's also more rigorous, requiring you to complete courses before songs are unlocked.
Try a family subscription and create a profile for Jake. Now he's been taking traditional lessons for a few weeks, and his colorful music books are competing for space on the piano stand with his family's iPad. He does a basic exercise involving three notes, in his own time. Suddenly, he is asked to perform to the SpongeBob SquarePants theme in time. His eyes light up (he's a big SpongeBob fan), but he finds it hard to stick to the beat. The app senses this and pauses the song and returns to practice mode. When SpongeBob returns, Jake follows. “That was so hard!” he beamed.
Yuval Kaminka says the number of subscribers has increased by more than half in the past year alone, and says the piano app speaks to a common desire and regret that many adults gave up on as children. . “Imagine a pill you could take to be able to play the piano. The whole world would embrace it because it's something people crave and it has romantic properties,” he said. say.
Other apps take the game approach even further, with colored shapes falling towards keys on the screen until the moment you need to press them. This is similar to the video game Guitar Hero. Pianos are also becoming virtual. PianoVision, Meta Quest's new app for VR headsets, places game action in the space above the piano, making the music appear to float above it. It also places virtual alphabet labels above the actual piano keys, into which colored prompts appear to descend.
What do piano teachers think about turning this venerable musical instrument into a game? “I think they definitely have a purpose,” says Rhiannon Dew, her son's teacher in his 20s. She points out that the Musicians' Union's recommended rate of £40.50 an hour for lessons is out of reach for most families. (Flowkey starts from £8.50 per month for an annual plan, and Simply Piano starts from around £7 per month). She says the app is great for people who just want to have fun with a few songs and chords, but it can't replace a teacher for kids.
Musician and teacher Alex Wybrew runs MusicTeachers.co.uk, a platform mainly for piano instructors. Much of the talk at recent music education conferences was about technology and the specter of artificial intelligence, he says. “There was a lot of fear in the classroom from traditional music teachers, and we came to the conclusion that the technology didn't exist yet to even replicate the pedagogical aspects of that,” he says. Then there's the human side. “Learning as an adult can be scary. They want someone to support and guide them through it. An app will never replace that emotional connection.”
But he's not a passionate person, and said his 8-year-old daughter uses Simply Piano in addition to traditional lessons. There are signs that private tutors are also benefiting from the piano boom. Wybrew said inquiries have increased by nearly 40% over the past year, and he has twice the number of teachers using his platform. Meanwhile, the Music Industry Association told me they've heard anecdotes that the most avid app users are graduating to real teachers.
I also tried Oktav. Oktav is a sophisticated German subscription site that displays sheet music as a kind of interactive PDF. Although it feels more authentic than more game-like apps, I end up using Flowkey the most, relentlessly playing songs until I can avoid mistakes. I slam Paul McCartney and Erik Satie. I'm currently trying to master Handel's Sarabande, excerpted from an obscure Baroque work, in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and an intermediate version of Britney's Baby One More Time. There is.
I'm happy that I can produce good sounds, and I'd like to do more duets with Jake, but I wonder how much better I've actually gotten. I came across an article about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias that explains the tendency of incompetent people to overestimate their abilities. You will be able to play Handel without making any mistakes in 1 minute. Next, you might stumble while reading Jake's beginner's book, Old MacDonald.
I'm also curious about how difficult the Level 2 exam that I failed was. I contacted the relevant committee at the Royal College of Music and dug up his 1993 syllabus from their archives. I put a scan of “Lullaby” by Twelve Easy Pieces on my iPad. That's the part of the exam where “many notes made serious mistakes.” As I play, I feel less lost than I did three months ago. But without the app's listening mode or images of the keys you need to play, progress is horribly slow. Once I manage the first few bars, well, I give up. After all, the fundamentals still need to be addressed. But after 30 years when my piano days seemed to be over, at least I'm having fun.
Source: www.theguardian.com
