MusicScienceGuy

Jammer vs piano - part 0: Contents

Curious about music-theory based musical instruments? This blog is for you. 

TypePad, does not have an automatic Table of Contents.  I have hand-created one

• 1.   Comparing Pianos to a new instrument, the jammer  
        Jammer vs piano
  
  
• 1B. What is a Jammer; highlights & discoveries overview
      Highlights & discoveries overview  
   
• 2. Somebody has to do it: my modest qualifications re musical instruments:
       No Qualifications, No Experience, Deep Interest
  
  

 

Jammer vs Piano - Part 6B - Jammer Problems

Jammer Problems

The jammer has these minor, technical problems:

1. Playing two notes with one finger requires accurate placement of the finger-tip, which slows play a bit. The keys should be reshaped to give a larger target area. The piano has a similar problem where the white keys narrow between the black keys.
   
   
2. The keys should be about 1mm wider than in the Axis-49 design (21-mm instead of 19), to match the natural spacing of the fingers.
   
   
3. The keys should depress about 1mm more than in the Axis-49. 3mm would give the keys a better “touch” and control over the velocity of each key.
   
   
4. No C-major Glissando. The jammer just can't play one.
   It can, however, do these glissandos':  whole-note , 5ths, 4ths and some more complex ones.
   
   
5. Chromatic scales are require more work to learn. This is because the player must jump from the major 3rd to the 4th to the tritone, an unusual movement.  

In summary, the jammer has no technical problems that prevent it from being a good keyboard instrument.

 

The jammer has these significant "possible" problems:

1. A jammer player must to know how to read (or hear) the tonal centre, scale type and chord progressions of the music quickly and accurately.
   Knowing the tonal centre is needed helps infer chord progressions, read the score and play the melody.
   The musical score only states the keys on the standard keyboard to press. The standard musical score score does not directly tell the player what the tonal centre is or the chord progression. Jammer players need to deduce these musical details.
   
   Here’s a personal example: when I built my first jammer, I thought I’d try playing Happy Birthday by ear. Unfortunately, I had not worked out a fingering, the importance of hand placement, nor understood the importance of key signatures matching the fingering, .  Consequently, I learned to play Happy Birthday with the wrong key-centre, and now have trouble playing this simple piece.
   
   Recommendation:  the novice jammer player should practice finding the total center and scale.
   See: Jammer vs Piano - Part 7 - The Minor Scale System and Jammer vs Piano - Part 8 - Identifying the key, tonal centre & scale (major/minor) on jammers
   
   
   
   1. The musical score shows what keys to play on the standard keyboard, not on the jammer. There is a huge difference.
      The guitar is successful has a beautiful, well-developed tablature that shows new musicians exactly how to finger the frets and strum the strings. Unfortunately, there is, as yet, no jammer tablature.
      
      Look at this simple score; a set of ascending triads in the key of C covering a full octave. Each triad shows three notes stacked with the same spacing, the same “shape,” just turned into a vertical stack. These “stacks” match exactly the spacing and “shape” of the piano keys that must be played. The human brain can do a very simple mapping from a visual position to a physical position, a task which the mind excels at. Virtually no thinking is required, just routing what is seen to the fingers.
      
      With the jammer keyboard the brain cannot be as automatic, at least without significant training. In the example given above, the chords shift between major to minor and even diminished. Each of these kinds of chords has a specific shape, while the shape shown on the paper score is exactly the same.
      
      Thus, in playing the jammer while reading the score, I found a very significant cognitive “battle” 
      [insert picture of ascending triads, spanning C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C]
      [insert picture of jammer key<=>chord shapes]
      
      I believe that the above is not insurmountable and that a relatively simple set of exercises can be devised to train a player to translate the standard score automatically. Alternately, the novice player may be better off playing by ear or or reading fake charts.
      
      Note that any alternative musical instrument player will encounter problems reading a traditional score and playing the right notes.
      
      
      
2. The jammer keys’ layout may help train a musician’s ear much better than a traditional keyboard or it may make it lazy.
   As discussed in part 5 -Expecting the unexpected, it's hard to predict old systems, be they computer or musical.
   
   The jammer keyboard has an exact visual match between the musical pitch of every note, relative to other notes. This makes it easy to read the musical intervals between any two notes, and to read the make-up of each chord. This simplicity may have three effects: 
   1. It may help train the ear in relative pitch, possibly to a strong degree.
      Reasoning: The irregular key-spacing of the piano's keys may unintendedly train the brain not to learn relative pitch. Using an isomorphic keyboard may do the opposite.
   2. The jammer player may become lazy and depend on the instrument's geometry for relative pitch.
   3. It may not have a significant effect.
      
      At this point we don't have enough information.
3. The great reduction in time needed to learn to play in many different keys probably means the ear is less trained.
   This is discussed in posting part 5 -Expecting the unexpected, it is very likely that since the jammer needs much less finger training, ear training will suffer. To compensate we could:
   
   1. Devise a set of jammer exercises, possibly computer based, i.e. Musiah) to train the musical ear.
      
      
   2. Perhaps a novice musician should first play the jammer by ear and switch to reading later.

 Summary:

Technically, the jammer has a few things it can't do and a few technical things to improve, but in net it has many advantages over the piano.

The jammer player has to learn to read the music from a musical viewpoint, to understand it clearly and not just play notes. Since the notes are presented to the musician in a music-theory format, this should be fairly easy.

A set of jammer keyboard exercises to train essential keyboard fingering, score-reading skills and the musical ear would be very good to have.
A set of such exercises are under consideration.

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Next: Jammer vs Piano - Part 7 - The Minor Scale System

Back:  Jammer vs Piano - Part 6A - Jammer Advantages

Jammer vs Piano: Table of contents

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Notes:

*  Exploring the Effects of Pitch Layout on Learning a New Musical Instrument, indicates that, over a short training period, the Wicki-Hayden layout of the jammer  is "optimal for playing melodies".

Jammer vs Piano - Part 6A - Jammer Advantages

Jammer Advantages?

Of all the possible isomorphic keyboard layouts, the Wicki-Hayden layout may be the fastest and most ergonomic, in theory. How does this layout actually turn out in practice?

I have experimented (my skill level is too low to say I ‘played’) with several hundred musical pieces using training programs Piano Marvel & Musiah, and the pieces assigned in the Douglas College MUSC 1160/1260 (Introductory Class Piano) courses over 8 months. This posting lists the positives I found.

The jammer has these advantages:

1. Four fingers can span well over an octave in routine melody and chord patterns without undue twisting or moving the hand.
   Mild stretching or hand twisting allows covering more than 2 octaves for special effects.
   Only four fingers are needed, leaving the thumb available to play extra notes. The index finger is capable of playing all “flat” (black-key) accidentals that come up, and the little finger can play four “sharp” accidentals.
   
   
2. The thumb is comfortably positioned and available to play many useful extra notes below the melody or chord the fingers are playing.
   In particular, a fourth, fifth, octave, an octave+fourth, octave+fifth and double-octave below are very easy to play with one hand. In other words, the thumb is freed to play a simple bass line, or thumb-operated pitch & modulation controls.
   
   
3. More notes are under the fingers than with the standard keyboard.
   On the jammer, using only the fingers, the player can immediately reach about 20 or so keys. On the standard keyboard, at any given time, the fingers and thumb can touch immediately about 13 notes or so; seven fewer keys.
   
   
4. The jammer has a standardized, quick-to-learn fingering.
   The jammer can be played with the hands in consistent positions, using a simple, uniform set of finger movements.
   The piano requires many complex movements, requiring various special techniques to speed play, like flipping the thumb under the hand or using the sustain pedal or pre-positioning the hand. These take time to learn.
   I can play arpeggios, complex scale patterns and chord progression faster on the jammer in all keys than on the piano (except some exercises (e.g. Hannon) that play better in C.
   
   
5. Big jumps (octave or more) are faster to learn and easier to perform.
   On the jammer, the hands need move a tenth the distance in a consistent direction or less to skip an octave.
   A much shorter, uniform travel distance helps the hand move quickly.
   Jammer key size, and key location match human finger size and finger flexibility.
   I can play arpeggios on the jammer, in all keys, faster than I can play them, in half as many keys, on the piano, despite having spent more hours practicing arpeggios on the piano.
   
   
6. Each chord, in each inversion, is always the same “shape”, thus easier to learn.
   On the jammer, the fingers always form the same 'shape' when pressing the keys for the chord for a given inversion, regardless of key (*) 
   For the major, minor, diminished and augmented triads, only twelve shapes need be learned. 
   The pianist's fingers have to reach in many ways to press the keys to make a chord: every chord has many “shapes” and the shape varies by key and inversion
           * Some pianists argue that small shape differences, e.g. flattening one note, are trivial; not really a different 'shape'.
   
   
7. Chord progressions need only small finger movements.
   On the jammer, the fingers generally only have to move to an an adjacent or pair of keys. 
   I found fingering some progressions on the piano to be awkward, especially in keys where the thumb had to press a black key, forcing hand adjustment, and perhaps starting with a different finger. This is a lot to learn.
   
   
8. Playing multiple notes with one finger is a very useful option
   The great advantage of the Wicki-Hayden layout’s adjacent major second, fourth and fifths: there are so many chords that contain these intervals. Playing two or occasionally three notes with a single finger makes for a reduction in finger movement and consequently an increase in play smoothness and speed.
   
   
9. Occasionally, sliding between notes is a handy trick. Especially useful for the index finger, which has to play all the flats and the fourth. Most commonly the minor third is followed by the fourth or vice-versa. It works well to slide the finger up or down a second. Another handy slide is up or down a fourth. (Moving up or down a fifth is rare for some reason.)

Note that the advantages listed above are technical fixes or improvements. This not surprising, as the jammer's Wicki-Hayden Key layout was chosen to fix known problems with the piano.

Summary of advantages

The jammer has lots of advantages over the piano, some quite significant.

But the jammer does have its problems. How do they stack up against the advantages?  And does solving the technical problems create systemic problems?
See the next posting.

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Next: Jammer vs Piano - Part 6B - Jammer Problems

Back:  Jammer vs Piano - part 5 - Piano Lessons

Jammer vs Piano: Table of contents

 

Jammer vs Piano - part 4 - Piano Lessons

A good course to teach a complex skill

Douglas College in Greater Vancouver has very interesting piano lesson classes. They are aimed at musicians that already have musical experience in high school., such as guitar and woodwinds. I found my modest experience in playing the jammer invaluable; without this practice, I would have been most truly sunk.

 We launched into basic simple 4-fingered  (tetrachord) patterns covering an octave and quickly expanded to 5 fingers on each hand. More complex fingering techniques were brought in. and more and more keys and scales were introduced. Eventually, we worked up to playing "exotic" minor keys and arpeggios, some of which involved "very weird fingerings", in the words of our teacher Barry.

Learn, Embellish, Repeat

One basic teaching technique was "learn, embellish"; "learn, embellish more": We would learn a simple technique, like playing a major scale in C, then learn all the simple variants: F and G (one note change),  then to play in the left hand, then learn D and Bb (two notes change), etc. By the end, we were playing with scales starting in keys with black notes, which requires a different set of fingers and thumb.  The net effect of "learn, embellish" was a big reduction in learning time and lots of repetition of basic finger movements. My ears also got a strong workout, as I had to hold a firm image in my head of the notes of the scale and check that the notes pressed matched the image. 

It is often mentioned by jammer advocates that "the piano has 24 fingerings" (implying that it takes 24 times much practice to learn as). But, as taught at the college, the piano student really learns 3 or so basic fingerings with 8 variations. The left-hand does pick up a bit of skill transfer from the right hand (nothing like the heavy skill transfer when learning the jammer). The net effect is that the piano only requires, to be proficient in all keys, I guesstimate 3-5 times the practicing that the jammer would require. 

But note, however, the term "proficient in all keys" above. The student at this point, madly learning to play, can skimp on the proficiency. Learning to play well in 5 keys, play OK 4 keys, and poorly in the 3 remaining is reasonable, and what the teacher accepted.

Curiously, the "learn, embellish; learn, embellish more" technique is very similar to the "deep practice" Daniel Coyle and others advocate. Training situations where one is at the edge of ability, making a controlled number of mistakes - and correcting them immediately – is an  excellent way to practice. 

And also note that the practice is training both the fingers and the ear. The intense ear training has implications discussed in the next article: Jammer vs Piano - part 5 - Expecting the unexpected.

An excellent textbook

The course textbook (Contemporary Class Piano ) was scarily massive and excellent. The teacher, Barry Barrington, himself a virtuoso pianist, selected small, relevant sections of the text to master, and gave us students a broad choice of pieces to learn.

Was anything missing?

An overview might have been nice.

There were some "overview" topics that I expected to present in this university-level course:

• Background on the musical layout of the piano: notes have what musical effect, how long they sustain  
• Where the percussion section starts,
• Where the optimum chordal section is,
• What parts are best suited to create a desired musical effect?

 These concepts and more have been around for years: see "How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons: What Music Is and How to Make It at Home" by Ward Cannel & Fred Marx. Mind you, it can be well argued that the student, over the course of the next 8 plus years practicing the piano, will figure out and/or absorb unconsciously much of  the above points, without needing to be taught.

Am I just supposed to "know" how to learn the piano because I learned to play the sax?

A considerable body of solid experimental evidence has been built up in the last 2 decades about how to effectively practice and learn. I was modestly surprised that nothing was mentioned about effective practicing.  Barry showed a cute video that urged practicing rather than dilly-dallying.  little was said about how to best learn; no review of practice and learning techniques.

For a good overview of what I mean, see: Daniel Coyles' The-talent-code, and Book review: Geoff Colvins' Talent is Overrated. Note: in the college's defense, that the class did, I think, use Coyles techniques with it's "Learn, Embellish, Repeat" system mentioned above. I just suggest making them conscious. 

Learning modern practice techniques is (in my opinion) extremely important: Research has found it not just a matter of practice amount, it's a matter of practice quality. The college program provided the expert coaching, but did not show us how to slow it down, how much to focus on the accuracy vs speed, and techniques for breaking it into manageable, learn-able chunks, this was left to the student.

 Subtle Links between the score and the piano

If one only plays the piano, the subtle, but very deep connection between the traditional Music notation and the standard keyboard layout is not obvious. It just is a designed fact.  It's everywhere; place your fingers here, and sharpen or flatten (shift the finger left or right a centimeter) the notes per the key you are in, ét viola! the right interval, the correct major or minor third, the correct complex chord  magically appears. I expect that this would become automatic and very fast, provided one is young. When one is 65, perhaps not so much. I'm getting a glimmer of this automation but it's slow in growing.

 Subtler Yet Links between the piano and my brain's perception of pitch

 I am bemused often by an everyday skill everyone has. I consider it one of the most astonishing feats of computation in the world. People pick up a smart phone and start texting. Typing away with either thumb, both  thumbs. Just doing it.

This generates the question: anyone older than 35 learned to "touch-type" on a full keyboard with really, moving key, using all fingers, so how do they automatically know how to type on a dinky little screen with one and/or two thumbs?

The answer, of course, is the that the brain is astonishingly good at creating good, flexible mental background image. In the texting case mentioned, the mind maps the learned image to the current image size and guides the fingers to targets in that image. Computationally, this is a greater feat than doing a hand-spring.  Backwards.

Playing a piano requires a similar mental feat. Ponder the dynamic "musical image" a pianist must have. The ear is hearing just 88 notes evenly spaced in pitch, a semi-tone apart. Yet when playing the hands are in different relative places on the keyboard, continually moving around  in 3 dimensions, the fingers shifting to sharpen or flatten a note as needed. That must be one heck of a image! The brain of the poor pianist is forced to do an awful lot of work. Those target, semi-tone-spaced notes must be very clearly marked and understood by the brain. 

The jammer and any other isomorphic (evenly spaced notes), instrument does not make the mind do the same amount of work.The hands generally stay in one place, or move in simple ways.

Does this make a practical difference?  In my very preliminary experience, it does. Occasionally in the last few months of playing the piano, I've had flashes of the "exact" note placement in my choral music. When I do, my wife (she of perfect pitch) reports that my pitch accuracy takes a big jump.

Could it be that intensely playing the piano for 8 months could do what 6 years of playing the jammer less intensely did not do? This must be investigated.

Summary:

I have spent 8 months learning the piano, with modest success: I passed the course, but can't play the piano, and the pieces I learned, well. 

I did learn :

1. To play the same pieces on both the jammer and the piano, so that I can compare the two instruments.
   (Note: I am a musical klutz, but I'll be the same musical klutz on both devices)  
2. As suspected, it was way easier to read a score and play a piano than to read a score and play a jammer.
3. Learning to play the piano may have trained my ear more than playing the jammer did.
4. Lots of basics about how piano teachers simplify the learning of the instrument, by starting in the simplest techniques and gradually adding on complications.

As a unexpected side-effect (the course syllabus did not mention) My musical sense of pitch improved significantly. 

Jammer vs Piano - part 2: No Qualifications, little Experience, deep Interest

First, a bit of background 

I'm a retired "computer systems analyst": I analyzed old computer systems and tried to improve them. 

The first jammer, made from a Yamaha keyboard

Musical instruments, learning them, and all associated processes are, to me, a system. I chanced across a proposed musical instrument that has many good features and built some.  But construction is, in my experience, less than half what's needed. All systems, musical or computer, need a way to operate them and a way to learn to use them.  Since no-one else has volunteered, I'm figuring out what I can about this new musical system and hope to help you learn it, should you want to. 

I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, a musician. Instead, I am a geeky nerd with a combination of mild Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and a middling - but unexceptional knowledge of the science behind music. I do sing with three choruses and take a part-time college music program, so I'm not wholly non-musical.

 I fell in love with instruments that didn't actually exist

A decade ago I was smitten by the concept of the "Thummer", a prototype alternative music keyboard that, alas, never got off the ground. That didn't stop me (note the term "mild Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder" above). With the support of a small online community, I started building these keyboards myself, refining the design into the "jammer keyboard", Then a miracle: we found the Axis-49, a newly-introduced keyboard convertible into good jammers.

 

The real fun begins

The second jammer, electronics from a keyboard

Once built (I built 5, others built some as well), the jammers had to be played. That's when inflated expectations and great hopes met poor ability.

These good-enough instruments reveal the limitations of this wannabe musician. Although I passed Music Theory both at Simon Fraser University and Douglas College, my musical ear is not very good. My hand coordination on keyboards is mediocre-to-lousy. Worse, my sense of rhythm is somewhere in Mexico, sipping margaritas with Jimmy Buffet. With these limitations, I cannot demonstrate directly the jammer. 

Somebody has to do it

But, I can tell you what I've found in a "systems analysis" kind of way.  I hope that you will find these following articles interesting and useful.

 

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 The next article: Jammer vs Piano - part 3: Methodology: comparing apples and oranges?  [under development]

Next:     Jammer vs Piano - part 4 - Piano Lessons

Back:     Jammer vs Piano - part 1B: What is a Jammer; highlights & discoveries

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 Jammer vs Piano: Table of contents

Jammer vs Piano - part 1B: What is a Jammer; highlights & discoveries overview

What the heck is a jammer?

Good question.  Here's the Jammer Wikipedia entry, but all you have to know is that Kaspar Wicki in 1896 and later Brian Haynes in 1986 arranged the notes on their instruments using music theory. (Wikipedia: Music Theory) Using two dimensions and small keys, they created a compact keyboard that places more keys under the fingers than a piano does. In our opinion, this layout is the best, ergonomically, of all the instruments we have reviewed - see Isomorphic Musical Keyboards.

Fast-forward to the present: with the help of the online community and great luck, we managed to create "Wicki-Hayden" keyboards and help others make them. We now call them "jammer keyboards" because the design lends itself to jazz jamming. Besides, we think "jammer" well describes the coolness of our keyboards. 

Please, do note that the difference between a jammer and a piano is less than it appears. With the jammer, fundamentally all we do is to change the placement, shape and colour of our instrument's keys and pair keyboards symmetrically.

These changes greatly simplify hand & finger movement, reducing the distance the hands move by a factor of ten or more and standardizing movement.  

Imagine those letters in a piano keyboard

Imagine a typewriter built like a piano

Here's an analogy: picture a computer keyboard with each key placed on a single row, stretching out left and right, instead of the standard Qwerty pattern shown. Intuitively, a long line of keys would take longer to learn and be slower to operate. 

 

 

 

 

Minor refinements add up

We jammer enthusiasts continue to refine and test jammer design. For example, the notion of paired, symmetrical keyboards was highly controversial at first.  Then testing showed that using the same fingers on each hand to create the same sounds and chords greatly speeds learning. Further, two-thirds of playing skills learnt by one hand transferred to the other hand. 

We found that jammer keyboards may have more keys than a piano yet remain light, portable and powered by a smart-phone, with seam-less thumb-accessible pitch and modulation controls.

Systematically colouring the keys helps guide play and may train the player's ear. 

The effects of many "small" changes do mount up and create a musical instrument that, in theory, should be fast, versatile and easy to learn. However, in the real world, there is a vast gap between "should" and "Demonstrated Fact." Fixing one thing may break something else.

 

 

Full-width jammer keyboard, with both flat and sharp keys

 About 50% more keys under the fingers & 3 cm octave jumps

 

So does it work?

 

 

 

Well ... Yes, and No. The instrument works quite well physically and is a good platform for composing (my opinion, after composing pieces in music theory classes, using a jammer). 

I found the jammer to be much faster to learn and usually easier to play. Since musical intervals have a precise relative position, it may encourage learning precise relative pitch.

However, there are challenges. They appear at this point to be easily remedied by directed lessons, as is discussed in later articles.

Humble pie

Perhaps the biggest problem for the novice is psychological. To the novice, to the casual observer, it appears that the main skill of the pianist is t0 know the right fingering of the piano. Especially if the observer is a musician with singing or single-note instrument skills. This caught yours truly. The reasoning was thus
"I already have rhythm skills, and enough of a musical ear to sing in choirs. If I have an instrument that has only a single fingering, instead of 24. I should be able to learn it easily".  

You still have to practice, to 'pay your dues'

Having an instrument that has many fewer fingerings to learn will not remove the need to learn many other skills. You still have to learn rhythm, rhythm, and yet more rhythm. You have to train your ear. You have to practice until the instrument becomes one with your fingers. You have to learn to be a musician, the whole of which is more than the parts.  The jammer will not help with these skills. 

Still, a lot of practicing can be saved. However, at this point, it's unclear what percentage reduction, how many hours of practice will be saved. 

Surprising things can trip up the novice learner. Here's an example: in my piano classes my teacher's most plaintive cry was "Ken, watch your accidentals". I was always forgetting to read my accidentals off the score, and forgetting to play them in pieces that I knew. Why? On the jammer, many of the accidentals were automatically taken care of by changing the position of the hand. Consequently, I built up less skill around accidentals compared to my compatriots.  

The jammer saves significant time in some areas:

• Much practice to learn fingering and hand movement in 12 keys, on each hand does not have to be done. 
• The jammer player will be equally fast in each musical key, with either hand.
• Skills learned with one hand will be available on the other.

More to Come

For more information, see these "Jammer vs Piano" articles:

 Next: part 2: No Qualifications, little Experience, deep Interest 

Back: part 1: Comparing musical instruments; modern to age-old

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 Jammer vs Piano: Table of contents

 

Jammer vs Piano - part 1: Comparing musical instruments; modern to age-old

New instruments illuminate music theory

Do you want to gain a fresh insight into musical instrument design and music theory? Do you build or use 21st-century musical instruments? If so, this series of articles is for you.

First, a disclaimer; "Jammer vs Piano" is a catchy phrase, but both instruments have merit; both challenge and reward the player. The jammer keyboard in no way diminishes the piano keyboard; this is a daughter/mother relationship.  However, as a good Daughter should, I believe the jammer sheds light on some of the quirks of her Mother, the piano, and shows the incredible talent of pianists and organists.

With these postings, I hope to show tres-cool and unexpected things about new alternative musical instruments. The intent is to save you, fellow musician and instrument builder, a significant amount of fiddle, trouble and frustration. To let you what you are getting into, to progress more quickly, and avoid wandering blind alleys.  

What I want to share with you

• First, I’ve developed and extensively tested a music-theory based alternative musical keyboard called a jammer, and worked out how to play it. The prototype plays well, with an ergonomic fingering system.  Pieces in major keys have nearly all fast, easy fingerings, while minor pieces have a bit more challenging movements. Even ragtime, with many semi-tone jumps and chromatic scales, is playable.
  
  
• Second, most new musical keyboard designs use a consistent-interval (isomorphic) note and key pattern, making the new instrument easier to learn. However, a consistent pattern breaks some centuries-old unconscious musical assumptions. This, in turn, causes unexpected challenges, but ones we hope to work around and document for posterity. See: Part 5: Expecting the Unexpected
  
  
• Third, I am learning both the piano and jammer keyboards and taking notes comparing the two. I am working out simple ways to measure their relative play-ability, discovering what specific skills an alternative instrument player needs. Alas, I have near-zero musical talent so can’t directly demonstrate the differences between the two instruments by playing them.
  
  
• Fourth, I hope to use the results of step three, to create lessons focusing on crucial musical skills for the new instrument, creating training to teach the key areas where a novice needs help. These include proper jammer fingering of scales, arpeggios and chord progressions, reading the score, ear training via the new instrument, advice on what to focus on, and what traditions to ignore.

Please give feedback.

More to Come

__________________________________________

For more information, see these "Jammer vs Piano" articles:

Next: part 1B: What is a Jammer; highlights & discoveries

 Jammer vs Piano: Table of contents

A responsive keyboard: getting 2 millisecond latency

It is finally possible to get a near-zero latency keyboard on a PC! It's most excellent to have.

However, some tweaking is needed to get a stable, effective system; you have to do more than plug in a new sound card. Herein I give you what worked for me, so you can hopefully get what you want quickly, avoid a fair bit of fiddling, and most important, never get that uncontrollable urge to throw your computer out the window.

A little background

To put things in context: my old setup was OK: I had a decent, but old sound card - a Creative Labs' Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium HD “Audiophile Sound Card”. It has a in-house Creative Labs' ASIO driver. which gave me, it said, about 20 ms latency - noticeable at first touch, but consistent and I could live with it; I knew of nothing better in a windows platform. I had tried the on-board sound with the ASIO4 ALL driver, which gave me the same or greater latency.

However, the X-FI card and/or the Creative Labs driver started to give me grief - it would freeze my computer at random times - being intermittent it took a long time to track down. Likely the card / firmware was too old for Windows 7 or had an intermittent hardware glitch.

Looking over the rather scarce options - there aren't many sound cards out there these days - I saw the Sound Blaster Zx for $125 Cdn, advertising "one millisecond latency".

First, does my setup like it?

First, Windows and the SB ASIO driver seem to work together well: 

 

My venerable copy of DPC Latency checker v1.2.0 reports a latency peak of .170 milliseconds; i gather that this means my desktop Windows is well behaved and meshes well with the hardware. 

The numbers look good

The card meshes well with my Kontakt 5 player, which estimates a 2.0 ms latency.

 

Also the card has 5.1 outputs, and a nice clean sound.  It was easy to set up, with one important tip: clean out all of your old SoundBlaster driver's and software first. I didn't because some of the old software packages were useful. Big mistake, that.  ;)

Blow me down - The SB Zx does work

It makes my jammer keyboards very nicely responsive: press key; instant sound. 

 

... but you need two sound outputs

Per instructions from the SoundBlaster manual, I tried to use the single SB sound card, by disabling the on-board sound. But Windows error messages began popping up.  for everything. Kontakt 5 & Sound Blaster's ASIO driver apparently grab exclusive use of the audio card (think of it; this makes sense if microsecond response is to happen).

Windows messages, system sounds and internet browser messaged simply could not get a sound in edgewise with this cozy couple.  The attempting routines would eventually give up, issue an error message or just plain freeze up.

My solution: keep the old motherboard based sound system going, and plug a small pair of stereo speakers into the motherboard. Windows and the others seem to actively prefer sending messages to the on-board sound card.  If one does not have a pair of extra speakers handy, I imagine that you could combine the outputs from the 2 sound systems with a Y-jack. 

Now, how can I do the same to my laptop? 

Alas, now my portable jammer's laptop 20 ms latency is much more evident. Fixing this is problematic - USB is designed for high throughput, not quick response.  

Please let me know, dear reader, if you have a solution. 

 

I hope this helps.

Ken.

               first posted March 1                                         Updated March 29

Starting an Greater Vancouver Alternate Musical Instrument SIG

Does the layout of the traditional, “piano” keyboard strike you as weird?
Do you want an advantage over other musicians and look really cool?

I’m starting an Alternate Musical Instrument Special Interest Group (sounds cooler than "Club") in the Greater Vancouver area. Do you:

- really, hugely want to learn an instrument, but don’t because the instrument looks arcane or you’ll be compared to musicians that started years ago
- are non-keyboard musicians: especially guitar players and sax players that want to play a keyboard but don’t because the keyboard is so bloody confusing
- are mediocre keyboardists that want a killer advantage: an instrument that is much faster to play and has many more musical possibilities than the traditional instrument
- are composers that want composition-boosting (instead of confusing) instruments

This is a truly great time in the development of musical instruments. New, intelligently designed ones are coming out; we now have the Daskin (a modernized piano), Dualo Du-touch, Terpstra, LinnStrument and jammer keyboards. All of these are designed to be both easy to learn, fast to play and train the ear accurately.  This is not hard - traditional instruments are not designed for any of these things. All of the new instruments have uniform, consistent fingering, that is, if you learn to play a song in a given key, you can play it equally well in all keys, and modulations are easy. Each has unique features.

If these new instruments sound scary-hard to learn, there is now available teaching software that multiplies musical learning speed  -and- it works particularly well on the new gadgets.

The group purpose: to check-out  these new instruments,  share ideas and experiences and hopefully gain extra proficiency in music. 

If you are interested, please send an email to [email protected] or drop a comment  here.

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.