MusicScienceGuy

Symmetrical Keyboards – getting results

What can we expect in benefits from keyboard symmetry?

In the preceding posting Symmetry in motion – a crazy idea, I discuss the basic idea of playing symmetrical keyboards and the many advantages. Here I talk less theory and more actual results.

How does this work in actual practice?

Tests were needed. In the Piano Marvel course there is a bank of exercises labelled “Technique”; these are largely exercises (the other section, labelled “Method”, has mostly songs to practice). This sounded perfect for testing symmetry. I experimented with learning the first level of courses, 100 exercises, with both hands, and different approaches.

The best way to learn seemed to be:

1. Do the initial fingering work-out with the non-preferred (NP) hand, my left.
   
   
2. Practice the piece with the NP hand, maintaining a level where about 80% or more of the notes are correct, gradually increasing the speed until the “gold piano” (no important mistakes made, equivalent to an A letter grade) is won at the game’s goal speed.
   
   
3. Switch to the preferred hand and repeat the practice, increasing the speed to 10% beyond Piano Marvel’s goal speed.

This approach, I found, gives a better workout to the less-proficient hand. My preferred hand then picked up the exercise quickly, so an extra 10 percent was usually needed to give the hand enough practice. Learning with both hands also seemed to solidify the learning; less skill seemed to be lost the next day. Done this way, two-hand practicing did not seem to be much more onerous.

What’s the catch?

Despite all the good things stated above, there are drawbacks.

Finger movements do not mesh well with the Traditional Music Notation
This is quite annoying at first: the left keyboard goes up to the left; the music goes up to the right. You do get used to it, but it does take a month or more, and if you stop practicing, you lose the knack.

It’s really weird to have pitches ascend away from the body

After so many years of this invariant rule: pitch-goes-up-to-the-right, it’s hard to think this new way and it’s easy to switch back to old habits. This fades with time, but occasionally still trips one up.

30% more extra work is still 30% more extra work

Remember those hawkers at the local fair who will sell you a “Wonder Knife”, and once you have decided to buy one, offer you a second one for “only 30% more!”. The second knife is a good deal only if you need a second “Wonder Knife. It is likewise with learning a musical piece or exercise.

Unison and octave playing is easy, so it feels hard to learn two-handed harmony

This challenge is rather more subtle:

• On a piano, playing the same notes across octaves, but with different hands, is relatively hard because different fingers are used.  Playing harmony with 2 hands is equally hard, but the student is by then used to it.
  
  
• On a jammer, it is a shock to switch from the easy unison or octave playing, where matching fingers do the same things, to harmony, where different fingers play different notes, sometimes on different rows.

I found the jump from single-handed melody playing to two handed harmony to be the first real challenge. Not only did I have to learn to involve the other hand, but it was different notes, played by different fingers. My subconcious had come to expect symmetry, and to rely on concious attention.

How hard is it to learn to do these things with two hands?
Playing intervals	Piano	Jammer
Unison	Not possible Unless one has two keyboards	Easy Same fingers on paired keyboards
Octave	Initially difficult Different fingers, plus the beginner has to watch hand move in big jumps	Easy Can do with eyes closed.  Note: can also just use thumb on same hand to play the lower octave or fifths.
3rds	Hard Have to learn many fingerings and black/ white note combinations Note: the key layout does often give one the "right" third to play.	Less Hard learn minor and major thirds fingering combinations – 2 sets of combinations
4 &   5ths	Hard Have to learn many fingerings and combinations	Less Hard  - fingers on different rows, but always the same pair of keys, the same angle – 2 sets of combinations
6 &   7ths	Hard Have to learn many fingerings and combinations	Hard learn minor and major sixth & seventh fingering combinations

            Legend:

• “Easy”                         a week to a month to learn
• “Initially Difficult”   difficult at first, but is done so much that this skill is developed rapidly
• “Hard”                        gradually learn over months of practice
• “Less Hard”               follows a simple pattern that can be learned in a month.

The net effect is to make learning harmony and playing chords seem relatively hard, a sudden big challenge. The student has to practice until playing harmony across two hands is just as easy as playing unison, which will take months. Fortunately, once the skill is learned, because of the simpler key layout, it generalizes to many songs.

Conclusion

The symmetrical musical keyboard offers strong advantages over asymmetrical ones: half as many fingerings to learn; finger movements the same when the notes are the same, strong skill transfers from one hand to the next and collision-free playing. Symmetry does not make everything easier, however. When playing harmony notes over two hands, the student still has to learn to use differing fingers and hand positions. The beginner also has to read and interpret traditional music notation, and get used to pitches being placed in novel directions.

Bottom line

The jammer student still has to learn the fundamentals; learning a pattern with the first hand takes just as long, so it takes just as long to get started.

If the student elects to train the second hand it will add about a third to the initial learning time, but, in return the student will be able to pick up and play more songs in the long term.

Related articles

Playing the Jammer - navigation and hand positioning

Jammer progress: Slow and Steady

Symmetrical keyboards - a crazy idea

Symmetrical keyboards - a crazy idea

Two symmetrical keyboards, one for each hand - an novel idea, but it works well

One of the strangest (initially) concepts of jammer keyboards is symmetry; the mirroring of motion between the two hands. This really made my eye-brows lift when I looked at Jim Plamondon’s first demos of his two-keyboard Thummer.

Jim Plamondon's "Thummer" keyboard prototype

And I’ll bet that that nearly everyone has the same thought:  

What a weird | interesting | bizarre | novel idea – wonder how it works out in practice?

Consider the standard music keyboard, which is profoundly asymmetrical. Seldom will the same fingers be used, and because the thumb has a different reach, the hand movement  and location must vary as well. This is a huge amount to learn.

Can symmetry give alternate keyboard players any help?

 Experimental results

Play the same notes with the same fingers

After learning several hundred keyboard exercises on the symmetrical 2-keyboard jammer, I'm confident that this design has numerous advantages. In rough descending order of significance, these are:

Only one keyboard “fingering set” needs to be worked out and learned, a huge reduction from the two sets otherwise required, one for each hand, on non-symmetrical keyboards. (*1)

Keyboarding skills transfer between hands playing symmetrical keyboards. To be specific, note-playing and timing skills transfer. In other words, one hand automatically teaches the other what to do, to a significant degree. (*3)

Parallel Octaves are super easy. There are many occasions in music where the hands play the same notes, an octave or two apart. This is trivial to learn and easy to play on the two-keyboard jammer; nearly zero effort. Not so much on the traditional keyboard.

Fingers do not collide. It is easy to play close harmony and contrapuntal motion with two keyboards.

The same notes can be doubled, giving a unique, subtle richness to the resulting note. This cannot be done on the traditional keyboard.

[Note: this is not to say that there are no little surprises. In the following posting I'll talk about these and give tested tips.]

Which skills transfer?

Some simple experiments (*3) established that (for this writer at least) skill transfer between hands on the two-keyboard jammer is about 66%, in close agreement with the scientific literature (*2). (see notes at the end of this posting).

 This applies to both the temporary skill one gains in an hour’s practice and to long-term, hard-wired movements, the skill developed over weeks of practice

To a first approximation, keyboard skills transferred equally well both ways, from right to left and vice-versa, as some of the recent scientific literature reports.

Do any skills not transfer?

Not everything transfers. Key basic motor skills , e.g. pressing keys fast, precisely locating them, and moving between keys, must first be learned by each hand. Thus you don’t get much of a boost at the beginning.

Why hasn't keyboard symmetry been tried before?

I think it’s just chance. Of old, the major hand skill was hand-writing, which is inherently asymmetrical.  Writing “dog” with the other hand requires different hand movements and timing, or else you get “qob”.  In other words, the other hand can’t help the writing hand.

In many tasks, symmetry is either not useful or blindingly obvious and done automatically. Keyboards are a special case, and it took the insight of Jim Plamondon to figure this out.

Clumsiness transfers too ...

Interestingly, I found, especially at first, a distinct flavor of “clumsiness transfer” as well as “skill transfer”. For example, if my right hand learned, the theme for “Chariots of Fire”, then trying to play it with the left hand would be reasonably successful, but some notes would be missed.

Now here’s something a bit interesting: when I went back to playing with the right hand, it then made the same mistakes the left hand had just made. In hindsight, this makes sense. Apparently “un-skills” could travel from the hand to hand just as easily as a skill could travel the other way.

To a psychologist, this would be a worthy research subject in its own right. However interesting this might be, this is an unwanted side effect. Fortunately, I found “clumsiness transfer” faded with time, with no conscious effort on my part; presumably my sub-conscious learned to transfer the preferred way.

Taking advantage of skill transfer to boost both hands to equal proficiency

Is one hand teaching the other really that useful? When would you ever play any song with the less proficient hand? Why learn to play a poorer version of say Hanon Exercises or Happy Birthday that you will never use?

Furthermore, it’s also pretty boring to work yet more on a piece or an exercise that you  (not to mention your housemates) are likely very, very tired of.

But consider the long term: the same snippets, the same note patterns will surely come up again and again. I suggest practicing with the less proficient hand patterns and songs that are generic. With modest additional effort, you can be ready to nail those patterns when they pop up under  either hand.

The next posting adddresses how to use symmetry effectively.

Ken Rushton   MusicScienceGuy

NOTES

*1. I  tested my keyboards using pitches ascending to the right, as on a piano. I found this arrangement was more than a pain; it was ugly; far harder to play and learn. 

*2. Some interesting snippets from the science journals:

Stoeckel T, Weigelt M. Brain lateralisation and motor learning: Selective effects of dominant and non-dominant hand practice on the early acquisition of throwing skills. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition. 2011;17(1):18–37.

Key Quote: “Participants initially practising with their dominant hand benefited more from practice than participants beginning with their non-dominant hand. These results indicate that spatial accuracy tasks are learned better after initial practice with the non-dominant hand, whereas initial practice with the dominant hand is more efficient for maximum force production tasks.”

Matias Edgar,  MacKenzie I. Scott, William Buxton  Half-QWERTY: a one-handed keyboard facilitating skill transfer from QWERTY. CHI '93 Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1993,  pp 88-94

“During the evaluation of a one-handed chord keyboard, Rochester, Bequaert, and Sharp [17] trained one student using the right hand only. The subject was later retrained to type with the left hand only. The subject ‘reached close to his right-hand typing speed in less than one third the time he spent learning right-handed typing’”

Teixeira L, Timing and Force Components in Bilateral Transfer of Learning. Brain and Cognition 44, 455–469 (2000) doi:10.1006/brcg.1999.1205, http://www.smpp.northwestern.edu/savedLiterature/Teixeira2000BrainAndCognition44p.455-469.pdf

“… bilateral transfer of learning took place for both anticipatory timing and force control, with more noticeable transfer of training for the former.”

3. Some simple experiments

If I learned to play an exercise in the program Piano Marvel to 100% accuracy with my right (preferred) hand (from less than 25% accuracy with either hand), the left hand could then play 60-70% of the notes correctly at the same speed.

The left hand then was able to get to 100% accuracy in about 1/3 the time. For example, when training the right hand took three hours, then training the left hand to the same speed and accuracy took only about an hour.

Curiously, this training of the left hand further improved the right hand. After teaching the left hand to play the excercise at 100 beats per minute, the right hand could play up to 110 beats per minute.