Review: Musiah Virtual Piano Teacher - Monthly USD $24.99
Musiah is a très cool music learning application. It acts like a simulated virtual music teacher combined with a "video game" style approach to learning play a music keyboard. It largely succeeds. With a few enhancements (planned for September) it should be even better.
For younger learners and some adults, Musiah is an excellent way to learn to play a keyboard, and may even completely replace the traditional beginning music teacher. I don't doubt that most students progress with this program faster than with a traditional teacher.
If you are interested, there's a two week free trial. Unusually, up to 6 family members can use the same license.
I suggest also trying out/alternating with Piano Marvel - it develops playing skills in other, useful ways. Piano Marvel also features the ability to purchase popular songs with excellent coaching in learning to play the purchased song.
Update: This review has been "peer reviewed" by the authors of the programs mentioned. The opinions given herein are still all mine, but I've corrected errors, adjusted phrasing and changed opinions where it seemed appropriate.
Premise and Appearance
Musiah appears much like a standard video game, but one with an interesting premise: you, a human, can save the galaxy from the invading Atonals, by learning to play the perfect musical weapon to defeat them.
Visually Musiah is a treat, it has a nice, smooth flow to the visuals and the colours are great; some serious work has gone in here.
I liked the simulated classroom and especially loved the teacher, he was just so like a nice music teacher, including cute, expressive twitches (suppressed swearing?) when his student, to wit: you - makes a truly big mistake.
The concept of being in a classroom, with friendly, supportive classmates who play along with you, is excellent and invokes practice-encouraging group instincts. Now, as far along as I got they were just background; I'd love it if later versions of the game have classmates giving a occasional bits of encouragement to the student.
The game is darned good at egging the gamer on to the next level, and it is obviously crafted by a master music educator. You just do not get all of this from a small shop in a couple of years. Regardless, this game uses the latest operating system and needs a late model Mac or PC.
Quality of lessons
The program has 13 levels, with about 10-12 music lessons per stage (plus a final finale level); about 130 lessons in all, claimed to be about the equivalent of “5-6 years of standard lessons”. To pass each lesson requires pretty deep, concentrated attention, the exact kind of "deep practice" that works well.
The lessons are very good. My wife, a qualified music teacher in her own right, praises the arrangements, saying they are just what I need to learn.
The lessons start right in on 2-handed practice and give the left-hand a serious workout and involve training timing as well.
The difficulty ramps up rapidly; by the 5th lesson, entitled “Mary Had a Leg of Lamb” (perhaps a droll joke; the teacher is a plump, albeit civilized, Allosaurus) we were into harmony - parallel sixths; melody with the right hand, a major or minor 6th lower with the left.
((Tip to jammer players: visualize it as down an octave and up a third.))
Challenges of the presentation
Here’s the first limitation: due to the video-game style presentation, the lessons are single-threaded, the student can tackle just one challenge at a time. This is good because the student must apply full attention to learning the one piece. Unfortunately, the student can get stuck, especially if using an alternative musical instrument.
Now, Musiah's author, Brendan Hogan, is adamant that the design of every note is planned to avoid bottlenecks: “[traditional] keyboard students do not get stuck in those places”. He's the expert, but I suspect that even traditional keyboard students will hit lessons where they progress pretty slowly, given the pretty intense ramping up of rhythm and notes in the lessons. On the plus side, if one does not drop out, the student will learn at an intense pace.
Another limitation: the program has a really limited range of slow practice options. I got stuck in several lessons, and could not slow play down to the point where I could easily master the notes and then crank up the speed a few percent each time, as in other software. Instead, I had to practice the pieces "offline"; reading the score and just playing the notes.
Quirks for the alternate keyboard player to note
Naturally, the arranger has chosen and designed songs that are easy to finger on the piano, with parallel harmonies that sound very nice. Inevitably, some of these are harder to do on the jammer, sonome, C-system accordion, or Dualo.
Let's look at a pretty standard example, suppose the arranger adds a parallel 6th below the melody. On the piano's white keys, in the key of C, the extra key to play is white, always two keys below the upper note; easy to play right? Whereas on the jammer, the relative position of that parallel note shifts between a minor 6th and a major 6th, depending on the position in the scale. It's significantly harder to learn at first, although I've devised some simple exercises to help learn the pattern.
With Rock Band and Piano Marvel, the solution to an too-tough exercise is first: give it a good try (this gets the brain thinking about it), then come back to it after a bit of time has passed. With Musiah the combination of exercises that are harder than the designer expected and one-and-only-one challenge at a time makes the program less suitable for alternate musical instruments.
Compare to PIano Marvel
Musiah has less lessons than Piano Marvel (PM) but makes up for it, in some ways, by being fussier; especially it checks note duration. PM does not, and the lack does make one more than a bit sloppy. I do wish PM had a duration checking option, along with an option to tighten up the note-start checking as well.
PM needs a section-looping option; it would be just great to be able to repeat a selected passage until it's perfectly mastered. Musiah needs a better looping option; it only loops some selected sections and only twice. It needs the option to repeat any section up to, say 9 times.
For myself, while I found the story line charming, I found that Musiah's attempts to provide "tuition": to carefully "correct and teach"; actually got in the way of learning. I could get way more keyboard practice sessions using PM.
These products work in different ways, Piano Marvel is designed to help a teacher give lessons and act as an assistant in teaching and monitoring the student, or help the self-directed student practice deeply and steadily. Musiah is an software-embodied Brendan Hogan.
The ideal in Piano Marvel is to get as many "gold piano" (every exercise nearly perfect; an B+ average) trophies as possible, which is a high goal. This is actually very similar to the goal system in Musiah, which allows you to pass an given exercise with an initial C+ grade, but then only passes the student to the next level after the student has gone back and brought the average of the 10-12 lessons to a B+ level. Very sneaky!
Target audience: pre-teen and adult
Musiah, especially if given the minor changes suggested above, can pretty much replace the basic, first five-to-six years of lessons, music teacher. It has literally infinite patience, and engaging story line, clear goals and feedback. Since the player generally would spend much more time in "deep practice" than is possible with a teacher, the learning speed will be correspondingly higher.
In fact, my concern is that Musiah could undercut the beginning music teacher, to the possible long-term detriment of the student. Studies (see Daniel Coyle's The Talent code: Greatness isn't Born. Its Grown. Here's How. See: chapter 9, the Coaching Love section) have made it clear how important the teacher is. Every single significant musical talent in the world had a special beginning music teacher, a teacher (or parent) that inspired, ignited, their student with a love of music and showed them how to learn and to feel pride in learning. Now with Musiah we are conducting an experiment: can software kindle musical talent?
Maybe it can: perhaps these programs can get music students quickly past the tedious levels of skill development, to the point where the student can really begin to have fun with music and ready to be ignited by a teacher. One can hope.
The price is high-ish but reasonable; the program has many thousands of hours of development invested in it, and the musical foundation it builds on is solid.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the game design will preclude teens from playing Musiah; most teens avoid child-ish seeming games. I'll bet that the program's writers will eventually split the appearance into two or three versions, adding an teen version, and perhaps an adult version for "mature students" who need to know the basics.
For the Adult learner
Musiah is not the ideal tool for the adult learner who already knows music, the rival product Piano Marvel has better features for the dedicated adult, such as the "space-bar" triggered practice session, practice-time count, and a huge repertoire. For this reviewer, who can read a score well and knows music theory, PM allows significantly more practice.
For more info, here's the link :
Summary
We live in exciting times musically, with programs that greatly assist learning and new alternate keyboards that speed learning and allow versatile play.
When Musiah's new version comes out, I'll eagerly review it.
Ken Rushton
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