A half hour spent thinking I was recording video and audio should not go completely to waste. It’s actually kind of strange watching hands dart across the keys absent the sound or vibrations one might naturally expect. I’ve played piano most of my life but seeing another pianist’s hands play is still a marvelous mystery to me. It just doesn’t seem possible.
I have difficulty juggling the very different mechanics of computers and the piano. True, my piano is digital, but little of its technology gets in my way. The same can be said of the 27″ tablet I use as a sheet music reader. Digital sheet music readers have advantages and disadvantages over printed scores, but for me the compromise has been mostly frictionless.
It’s not the environment in which I learned to play but I’ve had no trouble incorporating the new interfaces into my pianistic activities.
One thing I never will get used to is the idea of turning the piano on. Having grown up almost entirely with acoustic instruments it just seems strange to me that the piano is not always on, or always ready.
The mental dynamics of wrestling with recalcitrant software or computer hardware require strikingly different attitudes. It’s hard to pinpoint but suffice it to say that when I am at the piano I am far more in control of things compared to when I am trying to get software to do what I expect of it. Sometimes this boils over, and I find myself at the piano but feeling repelled from the instrument by crappy or confusing software. This occurred a few days ago, when I attempted live video streaming from my piano through YouTube. I have the bandwidth to stream high quality video but the tablet computer lacks the processing power to encode quickly enough. There may be other caching solutions available but the time and industry needed to reach the goal of streaming full screen quality video (and audio, of course) seems gratuitous. For me, that is. Not for others. I do, however, find something vital and engaging in knowing that a video stream from someone’s house is live versus canned.
