Guide
9 things I use the iPad for – more than I thought
by Martin Jungfer
Piano Goes Guitar Hero: Using gaming methods to become a virtuoso?
2.9.2018
Translation: machine translated
Video: Stephanie Tresch
Yamaha claims that anyone can learn to play the piano in ten minutes. Team IFA does not leave this untried.
Making music is a beautiful thing. Someone taps keys or plucks strings and sound fills a room. It connects people and together they share a fleeting bit of sound created by a human being. Music from speakers cannot compete with this, because no matter how good Bob Dylan or Michael Jackson may be, there is nothing like the intimacy of a guitar by the lake or a piano.
Probably the best example of this is a video recording I made at Basel railway station in May this year. As part of a promotional campaign, a music store set up a piano. A woman places her shopping bags next to the piano and starts to play. After she has been playing for about ten minutes, a group of children in wheelchairs join her. A boy strums along while she continues to play. Only then do I realise that I have a camera with me and might want to capture the moment.
I want to be able to do that too. The IFA in Berlin may not be the ideal place to start a career as a piano virtuoso, but the manufacturer Yamaha claims that anyone can learn a song in ten minutes thanks to its fusion of piano and app. Video producer Stephanie Tresch and I decide to take up the challenge and try out the new Yamaha CSP-170 plus matching app.
Now pianos are smart too
The piano looks like a piano. Only more compact, because the keys are probably the only mechanical component on the whole machine. The rest is electronic. I sit down and select a song on the iPad above the piano. "Clocks" by Coldplay.
This is because this is pretty much the first song on the first screen that I actually know. A metronome tick escapes from the black box in front of me and I quickly realise how Yamaha imagines it. Do you know Guitar Hero? You have a controller in your hand and the button combinations run towards you on the screen. You press the right button at the right time and you get points.
Yamaha's CSP series works in a very similar way. The panel above the piano keys, which I previously thought was polished wood, is actually a kind of display in which the manufacturer has installed so-called stream lights. These light up above the keys when they need to be pressed. Red for white keys, blue for black keys. In beginner mode, the piano waits patiently until you have pressed the right button before showing you the next note.
The first attempts are a bit clueless. However, I feel less like someone trying their hand at a piano and more like I'm playing a video game. Of course, since I haven't read any operating instructions or actively learnt how to play the piano before this morning, my attempts seem a little clumsy. I don't know where to put the fingers that aren't my right index finger. But I make sounds. Tones that sound at irregular intervals like the Coldplay song is supposed to sound.
Stephanie sets up the camera.
The computing power in the app
The CSP series is not exactly new. Stephanie comes from a family of musicians and remembers her CSP from her childhood. The principle with the little lights above the keys is nothing new, she says. She already had one back then. But she is not familiar with some of the functions. The fact that the piano waits until the player hits the note is new. The fact that the whole instrument looks more like a piano than an electric instrument is also new.
Meanwhile, I ponder how this works during my clumsy strumming. I suspect that the piano itself is quite stupid. All the intelligence is taken from the iPad, which provides more than enough processing power to interpret an MP3 and a MIDI file at the same time. The latter file, according to Stephanie, could be the file that the piano uses to activate the Stream Lights. I mean, any halfway decent computer - smartphones and tablets included - should be able to abstract an MP3 file on the fly and make Stream Lights compatible records.
Against my theory and in favour of theirs is that you can play any song on the CSP-170 and the connected tablet after running any audio file from your collection through the Smart Pianist app (Apple iOS and Android). ]hunted. "That's probably where the MIDI file is generated," says Stephanie.
A virtuoso in ten minutes?
I now play with two fingers and significantly faster. But I'm still miles away from playing the piano myself. But I feel good. I can do it, albeit still very badly. At least I already know the system. Light goes on, press the button. My old gamer nerves are twitching again. It almost feels like a combo in Mortal Kombat. Wait for the timing, press the button. Just with a lot more buttons.
It takes me considerably longer than ten minutes to get the first few notes to sound the way they should. But as soon as more instruments are added to the composition, it becomes difficult again. I make mistakes, but I know that if I get enough practice, the song won't be a problem.
But I wonder how much I'm actually learning to play the piano through this method. Being able to keep to a sequence of keys and actually playing music are two completely different things. It's not going to turn me into Sonya Belousova.
I want to have another go, another Coldplay, for about the fifth time. But Stephanie has switched off the camera.
"We have to keep going," she says.
Good, I get up, thank the gentleman who has patiently explained everything to me and pick up my rucksack. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a movement. Stephanie sits down and puts her fingers on the keys. Coldplay.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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