Touch Pianist is a phone app/website that was released today and every tech geek is blogging about it. As I'm a music geek and ran into it I thought I would also write a little post about it. So here's what I have to say:
Teachers: learn piano if you don't and be prepared to teach people piano.
The interface for touch piano
The premise of the app is very simple: Take a well known classical piano piece. Every time you press your screen or press a key notes will play. Repeat until the end.
I fiddled with this app for a while and I have to say it's intoxicating. While I can play the piano, I would hardly say I'm remotely good at the instrument. This app made me want to brush off my books and relearn how to play piano. Honestly I might start practicing piano seriously again because this app is pretty inspiring. Just hammering out the last movement of Beethoven's Appasionata, or the opening of Pathetique, without spending the time to actually learning the notes and the proper technique is still somehow incredibly fun to play.
While you can't control the dynamics (well) and articulation is still an issue, it is still a fun way to mess around with amazing classical works and feel a way of expressing yourself musically without spending the hundreds or thousands of hours necessary practice to master these pieces. I definitely felt inspired to dust my music off and start practicing again and I believe this app is an amazing way to introduce people to what it feels like to be a classical musician.
While this doesn't remotely feel like playing on an actual piano, it is definitely worth letting students take a crack at this simply because when I was playing this I was playing it as I would a real piece. While the export of the audio is obviously MIDI and doesn't effectively emulate the sound of the piano, I still felt moved trying to give a, albeit romantic, performance of Beethoven.
So stop listening to me and click on this link and visit the website! Be warned: It works best on Chrome. Firefox works, but it doesn't work on IE.
