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Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#91

Post by jacquesm »

bromley wrote: post #85
jacquesm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting track, there are a number of pianists (very good ones) that went that route. Keith Jarrett for instance, and Friedrich Gulda.

Keith Jarrett is one of my piano heroes :) The conventional way of learning piano has a student learning sheet-music pieces that get increasingly difficult as the student improves. It's a fairly linear path, and the vast majority of students will never be able to play a difficult piece like, say, Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu, as well as a top performer. Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicing…

I think the grading compared to a 'top performer' is about as silly as grading people that jog for an hour after dinner versus Usain Bolt. Music is something you to do enjoy, not because it is top sport!

Obviously there are going to be incredible performers at the high end but there is plenty of fun to be had in the middle and even on the low end.

I have a few pieces that are so beautiful compared to evertyhing else out there that if that were the norm those pieces might as well never be performed again, but then again, it's all subjective and what I like you might not.

> Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicings/improvisation route will never be able to play Over The Rainbow as well as Keith Jarrett, but they can at least have the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it in their own unique way.

Yes, true. And that too is a lot of fun. I did some jam sessions with the sax (and I wasn't all that good), most fun I had making music to date.

> Composing your own music takes it a step further again.

That might actually at some level be more essential than just reproduction. The cave men had it easy: everything they did was original.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#92

Post by jacquesm »

TrueDuality wrote: post #89
jacquesm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of work done to the the timing as accurate as the chosen environment (the browser) allows and the grading takes into account both what you play as well as when you play it. There are more dimensions to add still: note release point and the volume at which the note is played. I think the software actually helps you to spot subtle errors quite quickly, but you'd have to try it to see for yourself.

FWIW both release point and volume are available to the software (MIDI includes strength/velocity of keypresses, vibrato, and release events)

Yes, that's what MIDI is all about. on/off/volume those are the basic components of any midi file.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#93

Post by jacquesm »

murbard2 wrote: post #87
jacquesm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's putting it mildly, but I'm slowly getting more grip on it, fortunately a lot of people far smarter than me have spent a lot of time on this problem and bit by bit I'm implementing their thoughts into software.

A fun example is this bar from Liebenstraum no 3, https://imgur.com/a/ud1VlJF It's the second bar on, the left hand goes A F# B# D# B# F# - Aflat F# C Eflat C F# Only the first note has actually changed though. Enharmonics in the same bar for the same pattern. I suppose there's some musicological explanation for this, maybe something along the lines of working towards a key change, but good luck intuiting this in sof…

I have no illusion that this will ever be perfect, but there is something that may be 'good enough' for the general purpose and then maybe we can very incrementally improve from there. One way in which to solve this is to use an algorithm for the bulk and a database of exceptions for cases where the algorithm would get it wrong.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#94

Post by bromley »

jacquesm wrote: post #91
bromley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keith Jarrett is one of my piano heroes :) The conventional way of learning piano has a student learning sheet-music pieces that get increasingly difficult as the student improves. It's a fairly linear path, and the vast majority of students will never be able to play a difficult piece like, say, Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu, as well as a top performer. Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicing…

I think the grading compared to a 'top performer' is about as silly as grading people that jog for an hour after dinner versus Usain Bolt. Music is something you to do enjoy, not because it is top sport! Obviously there are going to be incredible performers at the high end but there is plenty of fun to be had in the middle and even on the low end. I have a few pieces that are so beautiful compared to evertyhing else…

Good points!

The beauty of a piece doesn't depend on its technical difficulty. Back when I used to play classical music more I loved playing a few of Chopin's Nocturnes repeatedly - they were about the right level for me so it was fun, and I could play them pretty well, I think. But I also spent a lot of time learning a few harder pieces (like Fantaisie Impromptu), and I remember getting frustrated that it took me ages to learn them and, although in the end I could play them sortof OKish, my efforts just weren't a patch on what a better pianist could do.

Looking back I can see that I shouldn't have picked such hard pieces until I was really ready for them. It was probably a big part of why I ended up quitting for quite a few years before taking it up again more recently with an entirely different approach.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#95

Post by kej »

I understand the issue with Firefox not supporting WebMIDI, but it would be nice if instead of redirecting to a separate page you could show the same message as a warning on the main page. Let me see the app and see that it's worth coming back in Chrome.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#96

Post by apankrat »

jacquesm wrote: post #83
apankrat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, yours is very nice too :) For what it's worth, the auto-correlation route is simpler and more reliable. FFT alone is not enough, because the spectrum tends to be rather ambiguous. There's still a pattern to it for every note played, so it should be possible to deduce a note with a neural net. But I just didn't have time for that, maybe later. PS. Give my thingy a try if you have a moment. I'm curious if it ac…

Yes, I know about the auto correlation trick, especially on the low end of the spectrum. I wrote an MP3->midi convertor that is very fast and does not use the GPU or any kind of deep learning, it also gives results that a year ago were SOTA but in the meantime have been passed by deep learning based techniques. I will definitely use your software. What would be great is to have a 'virtual midi device'. If it works we…

Re: a virtual midi device - I don't know the specifics of WebMIDI, but I'd think it should be rather trivial to code on top of any pitch detector, including mine. In terms of licensing - the code is already BSD-2.

Re: the another note - yes, indeed. I too realized this, because mis-detected notes are usually off by a full octave.

As a side note, after going reading through various papers on the subject, it would seem that an ultimate note detector should really be based on a Const-Q spectrum analyzer feeding into an NN. Training the net, even from scratch, can be as simple as sitting in front of a piano and then repeatedly playing each note in all possible ways. Then, throw this detector in a group with waveform-based detectors, get a weighted consensus and that should, in theory, be pretty damn accurate.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#97

Post by TrueDuality »

There is an `about:config` setting to enable webmidi in Firefox `dom.webmidi.enabled`. It's not a great experience to have to set that by hand. It does work though, at least in Linux.

It looks like your site isn't detecting whether the webmidi feature is present though, it looks like its just doing dumb UA filtering.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#98

Post by danudey »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #38

This will not teach you to play piano. It will teach you how to play beginner piano badly, and then will create intense confusion if you try to learn harder pieces because you will not have learned basic finger techniques - which include counter-intuitive finger-over/under moves and unexpected hand position changes that anticipate what you need to play next. Piano sheet music includes these finger position hints. Unf…

> So there's a trade off between trying to offer easy but limited success with some entertainment value, and going the whole way and doing it properly - which all but the most musical kids get very bored by, because it's such hard work.

I think the value is in option #1.

My son is 5 years old and just started grade 1; his best friend at school has two parents who are quite musical, and so he's been taking violin lessons. Thanks to COVID, he was stuck in the house, bored, all summer, and decided to spend basically the whole time practicing (mind you, the kid is barely 6) and now he's way beyond the other kids his age and is extremely proud of what he's accomplished.

Conversely, my son hates fine motor skill activities; he's not good at them, so he doesn't want to do them, so he doesn't get good at them. We couldn't convince him to practice drawing, writing his letters, anything; he didn't want anything to do with it. Until, that is, we told him (not entirely falsely) that improving his ability to use a pen, pencil, marker, etc. with precision would also help his ability to use a Switch joy-con thumbstick with more precision.

Last year, in kindergarden, he would get extremely (disruptively) upset when he even thought it would soon be time to do art, drawing, letters, whatever. Now he starts every morning in class by drawing. There are other things he could be doing, apparently, but he draws, every morning, because the idea of getting better at video games got him over his initial resistance to try something new that he wasn't good at and to improve at it.

I doubt I could ever get him to really practice piano, or to even get him interested in it, but if I put something in front of him that showed him how to play the Super Mario Bros theme I think he'd be pretty excited about it. I think I'll try this afternoon.

Sometimes it's not about getting great; sometimes it's not even about getting good. Sometimes it's just about starting in the first place.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#99

Post by toast0 »

danudey wrote: post #98
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #38

This will not teach you to play piano. It will teach you how to play beginner piano badly, and then will create intense confusion if you try to learn harder pieces because you will not have learned basic finger techniques - which include counter-intuitive finger-over/under moves and unexpected hand position changes that anticipate what you need to play next. Piano sheet music includes these finger position hints. Unf…

> So there's a trade off between trying to offer easy but limited success with some entertainment value, and going the whole way and doing it properly - which all but the most musical kids get very bored by, because it's such hard work. I think the value is in option #1. My son is 5 years old and just started grade 1; his best friend at school has two parents who are quite musical, and so he's been taking violin less…

> Conversely, my son hates fine motor skill activities; he's not good at them

My motor skills are _fine_, and I had a lot of issues with that throughout schooling (especially cursive, grrr, but drawing/art was also hard), but I played a string instrument (bass, and guitar), and didn't feel the same kind of frustration with that. I mean, chords are hard and kind of frustrating, but I think that's true for everyone. Piano and fretted guitars have the bonus that you can't be off pitch, as long as you hit the right one. Moving a pencil on a page is a lot different, you have to push down enough, but not too much, while making shapes in the right sequence, and you have to fit in the lines, etc, etc. UGH. Hitting the keys with the right strength is important for piano, but at a beginner level, just doing it not too hard is enough.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#100

Post by myself248 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #38

This will not teach you to play piano. It will teach you how to play beginner piano badly, and then will create intense confusion if you try to learn harder pieces because you will not have learned basic finger techniques - which include counter-intuitive finger-over/under moves and unexpected hand position changes that anticipate what you need to play next. Piano sheet music includes these finger position hints. Unf…

> It's hard to include correct fingering in the model without some kind of camera and image recognition system

That seems like a splendid idea. High-res cameras are cheap, and computer vision is all the rage lately.

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