MPD

When I bought my MIDI cable a while ago, I had assumed that mostly I’d be recording myself play piano, and I have done that a bit. However, it turns out that there is more to having a MIDI keyboard than recording. You can also play games with it.

One of my favorites is Synthesia – a Guitar Hero clone, but for piano. I love the concept of this; Guitar Hero is such a fun and addictive game that some people will play for long hours to become good at it. Why not use the same format to teach people a useful skill?

The first thing you do when starting Synthesia is load a .mid file that you want to play. Generally, piano scores work best. Then, you choose which tracks you want to play, and which you want to play automatically as accompaniment. Once all this is set up, you can begin to play. The format is the same as Guitar Hero – bars roll down the screen, and you have to hit the correct keys as the bars hit the bottom. You score points by hitting notes at the right time, depending how fast you have the song playing (you can play from 10% to 400% of the original speed), and how many notes you hit in a row. At the end, the game grades you and provides you with a number of statistics.

I actually think that it’s not really the format of scrolling, colored bars that makes Guitar Hero addictive; it’s the instant feedback. This provides a goal that is very easy to visualize and you can immediately try to improve it by playing again. Beyond being immediate, it’s also a precise number. What piano teacher can tell you that you hit 97% of the correct notes and only struck 5 extra notes not in the song? People have a very strong desire to be scored and ranked.

In fact, to get a little off topic, this is the same phenomena used by many online projects to encourage participation. For example, message boards often display post counts next to member names and give higher-posters special designations. These designations may not actually mean anything, but some people will strive to become “the best” by constantly responding to every post. I actually thought there some studies done on this topic, but I’m having a difficult time finding any to link to right now… Perhaps I should write a more in depth post later. In any case, for a quick example of what I’m talking about, try playing this simple paper-airplane throwing game knowing that I scored 114.199.

Finally, to get back to the original point of this post, if you have a MIDI-compatible keyboard, definitely try out Synthesia. The only complaint I have is that it would be nice to have a sheet-music mode as well for those people who would also like to learn to sight read a bit better. For a lot of free MIDI files of classical piano music, see the Mutopia Project.