MusicScienceGuy

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 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.