WG: How were you first inspired to utilize the premise of a videogame to teach something like music?

Chris Salter: Parallel with my studies in Brazil, I was exploring MIDI technology in it’s early stages, more as a user than programmer, but I could see the power of it, and how MIDI translated arcane musical terminology and symbols into a simple mathematical grid of pitch and time. It had to or the computer would never be able to interpret this confusing 1000 year old code and language. I also learned to type on a simple video game on a Lisa 2 Apple computer, after having humiliated myself in typing classes. That is where I began to wish someone else would invent a game to play piano and then read music. After a few years of toying with the idea in my head, I realized it was me who had to do this. What I didn’t know at the time was how hard it would be, and that I needed to recruit a small army of investors, programmers, graphic artists and of course lawyers to get it done.

WG: Why do you think that music reading via notes has persisted as long as it has?

Chris Salter: Music notation is somewhat like the written Chinese language. Even though the alphabet as a writing system is more efficient, the ideograms have almost 5000 years of extra meaning embedded in them, cultural depth that an alphabet cannot possibly convey, a historical treasure that as inefficient and cumbersome as it is, has too much value to discard. For example, the characters of mother and child together have a third meaning, “good”. How can those four letters express that level of “good”? They cannot, and something fundamental like the importance of family is lost when you strip away the characters. Repeat that times thousands of characters and combinations. Music notation is like that. Literally coming from drawings of monks hands as the simplest way to show a 5 note scale and conduct Gregorian Chant, music notation became a precious way pre-electronics to pass on and build on each other’s musical genius. But then each new generation and age had new dimensions, from the invention of the organ, then the harpsichord, came a complete retuning in the Renaissance and Baroque, 12 equal half steps instead of a 5 note scale, and then the piano and a complete shift in musical grammar and form in the Classical age, to muddying and then complete disregard of those forms and harmonic “rules” in the Romantic and Impressionist eras. But musical notation was not discarded, it just became more and more complex, and farther and farther away from its initial simplicity, to the point where it is actually more of a barrier to learning music than an aid, much like Chinese characters are a barrier to learning the spoken language. But that is where the fundamental confusion comes in. No one in China learns Chinese by the abstract characters, they learn by speaking, or doing first, and then recognize how the language they are already fluent in is represented. To me, that is one of the fundamental keys to the effectiveness of Piano Wizard, is that the kids start with playing real music, and only then go to the next levels that reveal to them how musical notation represents the music they already know how to play, following the natural sequence of language acquisition. Until today, there wasn’t really an interactive fun way to teach other people’s music without using notation or memorization, either of which is pretty arduous. We do not consider the Piano Wizard system to be a substitute for musical notation, but a bridge, a vehicle. Because like it or not, there is a thousand years of incredible music written in that form, and we need to be backwards compatible with that. Few people comprehend the true genius of Bach, but our game can reveal it to a child in living color. That is very cool, but it is just the beginning of a lifelong musical journey we would like them to take, and enjoy.

Articles on WomenGamers.Com solely reflect the experiences and perspectives of the author(s). Feel free to agree or disagree in the accompanying forum thread.